On Addiction, Dispossession, and Social Justice

An Interview with Anthropologist Angela Garcia

About Angela Garcia
	Angela Garcia, a native of New Mexico, is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at Stanford University. She holds a BA in anthropology from the University of California at Bekeley and a PhD from Harvard University. Professor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme of her work is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. She is also interested in the literary integrity of anthropological writing. Her book, “The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande” (University of California Press, 2010) received the 2012 Victor Turner Prize and a 2010 Pen Center USA Award.
	Dr. Garcia lives with her husband and two children in Oakland, California.

Apuntes: Tells us about growing up, your early school years, formative events or experiences.

AG: I was born and raised in New Mexico, and was aware early on of the uniqueness of being from New Mexico, in part because there was a period when we lived in Maine.

My mother basically fell apart in Maine. She just could not relate to the landscape or to the culture, which was very “eastern.” We ended up staying there for a few years and my mother became friends with the only person she could identify with, who was a Penobscot Native-American. So we became strangely close to a tribe in Maine that felt isolated from the white mainstream. Through that experience I realized something about what it is to be a minority. Even though we were from New Mexico, light skinned, Hispanic, we felt very isolated in Maine and bonded with this tribe. Then we moved back to New Mexico.

That experience really stuck with me and led me to be curious about other cultures and how they engage the world. Particularly when a group is “native,” and yet they live in an environment where over generations they have been dispossessed of their status. That’s something that the Penobscot tribe experienced in Maine, and is certainly something that Hispanics have experienced in New Mexico; they’ve lost political, cultural and economic power, yet they are still culturally powerful. But they see themselves as having lost a tremendous amount of status.

When we returned to New Mexico I had a greater appreciation for what New Mexico meant, its kind of distinctiveness.

Apuntes: In your community in New Mexico, were there a lot of Hispanics?

AG: Yes, the community was almost entirely Hispanic, I would say probably 98 percent. Now it’s more Mexican, a lot of Mexican immigrants have moved in and have transformed the community. But my family has been in New Mexico “forever,” we are part of the original Spanish-Americans. We actually considered ourselves Spanish. When I moved to California I realized that sounded absurd, but in New Mexico it was what one said, you definitely did not consider yourself Mexican, that was almost a bad word. When my mom was growing up she was not allowed to speak Spanish in school, kids were beaten for speaking Spanish in school. My generation, coming after that, had a kind of confusing relationship with our culture. My mother was, on one hand, proud of it, on the other hand somewhat ashamed of it.

Apuntes: Where did you go for undergraduate studies?

AG: I came here, to California, to San Francisco, right after high school. I wanted to move out of New Mexico and had an opportunity to come here with some friends. I started out at the City College. I was not prepared for college, in terms of SATs, etc.; my high school certainly did not prepare its students in this way. It was a school that prepared people for the military, if anything, and not college.

From City College I transferred to UC Berkeley, and finished my undergraduate work there.

Apuntes: Then you went to Harvard?

AG: I went to Harvard after first taking some time off from school and working in the area of health issues. This was in the late 1990s, when HIV was still devastating San Francisco’s gay community. I worked in an HIV treatment organization and became very interested in women’s health issues. Then I had the opportunity to spend some time in South Africa and travel around the world, partly through this job. When I was in South Africa I decided to apply to graduate school to continue my path in health-oriented scholarship.

Apuntes: So before you moved to Massachusetts you had traveled quite a bit.

AG: I had. Now that I am a professor and I hear other professors talk about non-traditional graduate students who are older, I realize I was one of those. I was in my late 20’s and I was considered “older.” Which makes sense, I guess, because there were mostly twenty-one year olds in the program who had spent their whole life other in school. I had a lot of other experiences, beyond being a student.

Apuntes: When did you decide to become a cultural anthropologist? Was it in Maine?

AG: It might have been! But it was probably at UC Berkeley. I am still close to my mentors there, the people who encouraged me to pursue anthropology at the graduate level. I think the courses they taught on subjects like global health, transnational families, the anthropology of war and terror, they really had an impact on me. Although at the same time I was also interested in literature and writing so I had to make a decision: do I go the route of creative writing, pursue a Master in Fine Arts, or do I get a PhD in anthropology? I still wonder if at some time I might try to get that Masters in creative writing. But anthropology just spoke to me, partially because it gave me the opportunity to travel, and I knew I wanted to keep traveling.

Apuntes: When did you go to Mexico for the first time? (I can see a trip to Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology convince someone to go into that field.)

AG: As a kid my family would go to Juarez. We would drive from Albuquerque to the border and spend the night. Later when I was 16 it was a big thing to go to the border and have a beer. So my experience with Mexico growing up was border towns. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I went to Mexico City and visited all the museums, and I was completely overwhelmed. I still am, even though I work there now. I actually had to also do some language training because I felt very deficient in speaking Spanish, even though I grew up hearing it. So I took a number of classes, in Oaxaca, and Cuernavaca, mostly as an excuse to be there.

Apuntes: Did your experiences as a Latina play a role in your career selection?

AG: Well, initially I had planned to work in South Africa. When I went to Harvard I had the topic for my dissertation all lined up. But I kept getting phone calls from New Mexico, from my family, and from people who were sick or overdosing. I started missing New Mexico while at Harvard. I began to crave everything Latino. And I met my husband there, Rubén, of Mexican-Salvadoran descent, who was doing a fellowship. We connected immediately because we were both Latino, a bit isolated, feeling kind of like, “what are we doing here?” So I changed from working in South Africa to working in New Mexico. I knew that working in New Mexico was a step towards Mexico, and that I would keep going south. But I needed to begin at home, then make my way.

Apuntes: Please tell our readers what a cultural anthropologist does.

AG: The official definition is that we are interested in everything that relates to human experience: the social, political, cultural, moral, and ethical aspects of that experience.

Apuntes: How does it differ from sociology?

AG: I think our methods are different. Our methods make us distinct in that we emphasize participating in the culture while observing it and trying to understand it. Renato Rosaldo, one of the world’s leading cultural anthropologists, talked about anthropology as a form of “deep hanging out,” really trying to integrate oneself into a community. The other aspect of anthropology that I loved was the literary aspect, the emphasis on writing. Some anthropologists are wonderful writers.

Apuntes: My understanding is that your research focuses on violence, suffering and care; on addiction, morality and science; and on subjectivity. What led you into this line of inquiry?

AG: When I was in South Africa, and as an AIDS activist in San Francisco, I saw the difference between people who had access to health care and people who didn’t. And I could relate to these experiences on a very personal level. I was interested in disparities in health and health care and also in the way in which poor people care for each other in the absence of formal biomedical health care. They care for each other in ways that are often good, but sometimes not. I was interested in how they make do specially in situations where they are facing life-threatening diseases like HIV or addiction.

Apuntes: Your book PASTORAL CLINIC: ADDICTION AND DISPOSSESSION ALONG THE RIO GRANDE has garnered several awards. Tell us about the writing process for that book. The Pastoral Clinic_Angela Garcia

AG: It was interesting. I did not go back to Harvard to write it, I stayed in New Mexico, in the village where I was working. I think that had something to do with the tone of the book. I was literally writing from a place of devastation. I made the point to write the book in a way that I hoped would make it accessible to non-academics. I wanted the people that I worked with to identify themselves in it. I gave copies of the book to all those I worked closely with, hoped that they would enjoy reading it, or feel something. I wrote with the goal of eliciting a visceral, emotional, as well as intellectual, response, or a moral response. And I was really close to the subject matter, in a personal way, so that also shaped the way that the book is written.

Apuntes: Your website indicates you are a health and social justice advocate. Would you mind telling us your opinion of President Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act?

AG: I think it is a step in the right direction. Like a lot of other people I wish it had gone further. But in terms of addiction, for instance, for the first time people who have never had any access to addiction care (or any care), will. Also, I have a brother with epilepsy who has had the experience of being denied insurance because of his pre-existing condition; that won’t happen to him any more, so that is an important accomplishment. I just hope it doesn’t get torn apart in years to come.

Apuntes: I understand you are doing research on addiction in Mexico City. And that makes me wonder if there are noticeable cultural differences between Mexican addicts in Mexico City and Hispanic addicts in New Mexico.

AG: I think culture plays a part on how addiction is experienced and treated. In New Mexico I was working mostly with heroin addicts. Heroin has a long history in New Mexico, and there is something cultural about the way that heroin is used within families. A lot of my work has been looking at the way in which heroin can actually keep families together: in addition to pulling them apart it is kind of a glue for people who come to understand each other very deeply through heroin. And there is a whole language around heroin in New Mexico that is culturally specific, that you would not find in Mexico City or Los Angeles, for example.

In Mexico City I am still on a learning curve, and I am also working with a different set of drugs (cocaine, crack) which lead to very different responses in the user. What I am most interested in how the drug related violence is affecting people’s desire to use drugs, or creating new markets of drugs and drug users. So I am less interested in addiction per se and more interested in how addiction intersects with the drug war.

Apuntes: I would have thought that the strength of the family unit in Mexico, the prevalence of extended families, would cause addicts to be treated differently there.

AG: It’s interesting, I thought the same thing and in a way I think that’s true. But Mexico City, in particular, has a huge problem with youth that don’t have a job, or an education, and you see them on the street. There is a lot of street youth, a lot of very poor, marginal homelessness. One of the things that I am looking at is the way that families try to find care for their kin, but forms of care that essentially lock them away for a long time. These centers are called “Anexos.” I am looking at how poor families work to keep addicted kin in Anexos to keep them away and hopefully in recovery. In New Mexico, among Hispanos, this would never happen. Families would never send a family member away. They would want to keep them close to home. The desire of families in Mexico City to send family members away, to hope that someone else will deal with them, may have to do with the violence and the insecurity, the chaos around the drug war.

Apuntes: You are working on a memoir. Care to give us an advance abstract?

AG: I’ve been trying to write a book. And if it is a memoir, it is not so much about me, it is about my mother and my grandmother. It’s about multiple generations of New Mexican women who are fighters and who are kind of messed up, but who are also loving and strong, make bad decisions but ultimately toward a good end. It’s a story about women in New Mexico, where I play a very small role, I’m just the writer, the observer.

Apuntes: How do you balance your teaching and research duties at Stanford?

AG: I love teaching, and one thing I like about Stanford is the small classes. I went to the University of California, and I care about the UC system, I believe in public education. But teaching small classes with students who are engaged is very nice. I am learning how to be a better teacher because I am interacting with students in a more intimate way. I try to keep my teaching and my research interwoven, rather than separate from each other. For instance, I have two research collaborators who are in the medical school, and they are currently in Mexico City working with me. I am mentoring them, and learning a lot about how to mentor across borders, which isn’t always easy.

Apuntes: Please tell our young readers why they should consider pursuing a career in anthropology. Or should they?

AG: They should, absolutely. I think anthropology is a fascinating and important field. More and more I see ways in which we are becoming disconnected from each other, from close social engagement. For example, in studying addiction there is a tremendous focus right now on the brain: how do we understand the brain, and what is its relationship to drug use? This is an important question but it can only take you so far. There is a whole world of issues to examine that are related to addiction. Those social, political, cultural, economic issues, even thinking about how science might be culturally biased, are the kinds of things that anthropologists do. We have tremendous freedom to examine the world.

I am always so happy when students who are taking my classes say “I am switching to anthropology, my parents are going to be angry, but this is what I truly love.” That’s exciting. I think we need more people who can have a holistic view of the world and its problems, and see all the different dynamics. I think anthropologists can be great problem solvers.

Apuntes: That leads to my next question. As a scientist you are documenting and observing what is. Are you also trying to make things better, to come up with new ideas and new concepts?

AG: I am very much dedicated to increasing and improving the kind of care that is available to the poor. I was so struck when in Mexico City, at a meeting with women who live in a very poor community, I asked them what they needed most. They said was “we need lights, we need electricity, because it’s frightening to have to walk in the dark.” For me to see that light is connected to life, and safety, and health, is an anthropological contribution. There are many simple things that can be provided that will improve the quality of life for poor people. So I am working toward understanding what people need and want, what are they are already doing and how can we build from there, rather than imposing solutions that are completely disconnected from reality and the local needs. In that sense I am very interested in contributing and improving lives. Not every anthropologist is dedicated to this, but I am.