The Pastoral Clinic ─ Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande

"Timely, disturbing, and luminously written, The Pastoral Clinic is anthropology at its best, bringing into view a devastating piece of reality, highlighting larger processes and human singularities, and calling for a new public and ethics of care."--Joao Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

"Garcia calls for a new ethics of care for heroin addicts, exposing the insufficiency and lack of continuity of rapidly privatizing faith-based services for the rural poor. Her heartfelt ethnography of the geography of addiction in New Mexico reveals how formerly agricultural communities and families find themselves painfully embedded in a land of dispossession and displacement with an unresolvable past, and an unlivable present."--Philippe Bourgois, author of Righteous Dopefiend

"Angela Garcia has expanded the roots and basis of addictions to the great losses--personal, cultural, economic, of birthright and land--that few would dare to explore. I've sought a book like this for years, addressing my own addictions and those of the young men and women I've worked with for decades. A formidable thinker, a wrench-in-the-works activist inside and out of the industry, Angela understands that addictions are not a 'always has been and always will be' fate, but a collective, individual, and even 'intimate,' funneling into the web. And how the path toward healing, reconciliation, and wholeness is in the land, in the hand, and the capable heart of every addict and broken community."--Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA

Angela Garcia is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.