The pastoral clinic

Angela Garcia's ethnographic study explores how heroin addiction is embedded within histories of land dispossession, economic decline, and social marginalization along the Río Grande.

Through close work in a detox clinic and long-term engagement with people who use drugs, Garcia examines how the chronic-disease model shapes subjectivity and moral narratives.

The book foregrounds personal narratives while situating addiction in political and historical contexts.

It critiques simplistic individualizing frameworks and shows how structural conditions enable and sustain addiction.

Garcia's writing combines ethical reflection with rigorous anthropology to illuminate addiction as both personal suffering and social phenomenon.