ANGELA GARCIA

Regeneration: love, drugs and the

remaking of Hispano inheritance

This article explores the changing nature of inheritance among Hispanos in northern New Mexico. Specically, it
examines how Hispano families have reworked the traditional application of inheritance, referring to property
passed down the generations, to conceive of heroin addiction as inherited. It shows how this emerging
formation of inheritance is shaped by, and refracts back upon, past congurations of property and belonging.
This article reects on intergenerational addiction as a modality of connection and continuity, but one that is
entangled with experiences of loss. It highlights the implications of this tension for anthropological understandings
of inheritance, addiction and the embodiment of history.
Key words inheritance, addiction, kinship, affect, property

Introduction
This article is an exploration of the changing nature of inheritance in Hispano kinship.
It draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted in northern New Mexicos
Espaola Valley to examine how Hispano families have reworked the traditional
application of inheritance to conceive of heroin addiction as inherited. One of its
central themes is the effect of historical loss on the making and undoing of relational
ties, and how a concept of Hispano inheritance that functions through addiction blurs
the distinction between these processes. This article engages this new formation of
Hispano inheritance and aims to show how it is shaped by, and refracts back upon, past
congurations of property and belonging. It thus foregrounds the material and
affective dimensions of inheritance, and explores their relation to the longue dure of
Hispano dispossession.
While inheritance is certainly not a new or singular theme in anthropology, it has
conventionally been conceived as the transmission of properties that link people,
generations and social institutions over time (Hann 2008; Finch and Mason 2000).
These properties have typically been considered as material or symbolic. Both
domains, and their entanglements and imaginaries, have been central to Western
constructions of kinship and have been analysed in myriad ways. From the
destabilisation of kinships materiality, especially in the context of contemporary
bioscience (Carsten 2011; Landecker 2010), to the fantasies and grievances enabled
by inheritances practices and mediums (Nash 2008; Povinelli 2002), the changing
nature and implications of inheritance remains a vital area of anthropological inquiry
and is signicant for the lived experience of kinship.
The Hispanos of northern New Mexico trace their ancestry to the Spanish colonists.
Their idiom for inheritance is querencia, the etymological roots of which blend the
notion of love (querer) with heritage (herencia). Affective and material, querencia has
traditionally been employed by Hispanos to describe a genealogical connection to the
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land (Arellano 1997).1 Vested with love, it was considered a powerful mode of attachment that sustained kinship and Hispano culture. Overtime, however, the connection
to land transitioned to an alienation from it, and in this transition, new formations and
attachments emerged, including addiction. Indeed, the striking use of inheritance to
describe intergenerational drug addiction emphasises the affective and material resonances
of this transferred meaning. A second-generation heroin addict may describe her own
addiction as her querencia or characterise heroin addiction within her family as our
querencia. Such expressions suggest a form of experience that is made meaningful, and
is positively valued, through the idiom of querencia.
I should emphasise from the start that the Hispano families I followed as a part of
this research were selected because they were contending with intergenerational heroin
addiction. They are not intended to be representative of Hispano family life or
addictive experience writ large. Rather, my intention is to show how specic Hispano
families, with whom I have worked for over a decade, have re-conceptualised
inheritance as they try to live meaningful and connected lives under extremely difcult
circumstances.
Keep in mind that, since the early 1990s, New Mexicos Espaola Valley has had
the highest rate of heroin addiction and overdose in the USA. Between 1995 and
2000, this network of rural communities saw over 100 deaths attributed to heroin
overdose. Heroin addiction in the Espaola Valley primarily affects the Hispano population. Among Hispanos, addiction is commonly shared across multiple generations
of kin, who often live in a single shared household (Garcia 2010; Lofquist 2012; Willging
et al. 2003). This arrangement reects Hispano traditions and ideals of family as cohesive,
self-reliant and enduring. It also reects and to a degree offsets conditions of
entrenched poverty, which include high rates of unemployment, chronic health
problems, and lack of health access and insurance, among others.2
Studying daily household activities, including getting high together, caring for
addicted kin, and narrating memories and feelings, yields insight into how expressions
of Hispano kinship are embedded in, and expressive of, complex rhythms of connection and disconnection, as well as broader relations of social and political inequality.
In exploring family narratives that reect this tension, what has been at stake for me
is to understand how heroin addiction has become a modality of connection between
kin, one that is profoundly entangled with experiences of loss and feelings of love
and longing. Ive tried to understand how addiction sustains a sense of continuity by
generating salient ties of injury and care, which are put into motion by the rhythms
of addiction itself.
In what follows, I reect on the nature and implications of intergenerational addiction and its insights about disruptions to Hispano inheritance. I also consider it as a
distinctly lively process through which kin generate and pass on a sense of being and
belonging. Drawing on narratives of Hispano family life, my goal is to offer a textured
ethnographic account of the complex relations and realities that converge around congurations of Hispano inheritance today, and to show its implications for anthropological
1

While the Spanish verb querer also translates to want, the idiomatic expression querencia draws
from the verb aquerenciarse, which means to love or to be attached to a place. See Juan Estevan
Arellano (1997).
New Mexico is 49th among US states with the lowest per capita income and has the highest proportion of people who are uninsured and living in poverty. Treatment services for mental health and
addiction are discontinuous or lacking.

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understandings of addiction, kinship and the embodiment of history. To begin, let us

rst consider the losses Hispano families have endured over time. This history is critical
for understanding the politics and ethics of inheritance enacted through intergenerational
addiction.

Genealogies of loss
The Espaola Valley is often described as the heart of New Mexico. Located in Rio
Arriba County, it sits at the centre of a triangle whose corners are the wealthy tourist
meccas of Santa Fe and Taos, and the techno-military centre Los Alamos. The town of
present-day Espaola was the site of the rst Spanish colonial settlement in the USA.
Extending outward are tightly knit villages whose residents locate their ancestry not
in an ofcial township but in a locality comprised of multiple generations of kin
(Pulido 1998). Thus, one lives not in the village of Chimay but in Los Martinezes
or Los Luceros, for example. Such naming practices point to the enduring emphasis
on kin-based constructions of relatedness, where landscape, household and lineage
are regarded as substantive connections. These localities evolved out of the historical
context of successive struggles over land expropriation and sociopolitical domination
rst by Spain, then Mexico and nally by the USA (Dunbar-Ortiz 2007). These
struggles persist, intensied by in-migration, gentrication and deepening poverty
and addiction.
Two Native American pueblos are located in the valley, Okhay Owngeh and Santa
Clara. When New Mexicans speak of the Espaola Valley, however, they tend to refer
to villages established by the Spanish colonists. The majority of the inhabitants of these
villages consider themselves Spanish or Hispano, and the Spanish language is still
spoken in many households.
Land was not a commodity in the Spanish colonial system. Rather, land tenure was
based on grants dedicated to families for settlement and agricultural production. In
northern New Mexico, Spanish and later Mexican settlers were allotted land for an
individual home, an irrigable plot for family farming and the right to share common
land with other families. According to the deeds, personal allotments could be sold
as private property but common lands could not; they were to be preserved for family
and community survival (Briggs and Van Ness 1987; deBuys 1985; Ebright 1994). As
descent was calculated bilaterally, practices of land inheritance traditionally involved
bequeathing land to male and female heirs, resulting in plots of equal but diminishing
size, all of which remained in the family lineage. This system enabled kin to live in close
proximity and work collectively as farmers. Such practices were aimed at creating and
sustaining crucial social, material and affective connections. Indeed, these connections
assumed a lexical structure of kinship as represented in the idiom la tierra es madre
(land is mother), as well as the agricultural terms acequia madre (mother ditch) and
sangras (literally bloods, or smaller ditches), which relate to the distribution of water
to family elds. Imbued with emotional connotations of a bodily connection between
mother and child, land was fundamental in imagining and enacting kin relations
(Rivera 1999; Zentella 2009; see also Leach 2004).
The expropriation of Hispano agriculturists from the land began in 1848, when the
United States violated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was to afrm landgrant titles upon the USs seizure of present-day New Mexico from Mexico. Women
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were the rst to lose their inheritance and communal property rights, as well as their rights
to hold contracts and testify in court (Montoya 2005). Many women sold their property to
male kin in order to keep it within the family. However, homes based in agricultural
rhythms were quickly replaced by a cash economy propelled by railroads, mining and
tourism. This new economy forced Hispano men to seek work outside their home and
village, and women struggled to maintain a remnant of their familys land (Gonzlez 2001).
By the time New Mexico entered the union in 1912, Anglo settlers controlled 90% of
the land that had sustained generations of Hispano farmers. Millions of acres have since been
transformed through powers of eminent domain into the Los Angeles National Laboratory
and the US National Forest (Gusterson 1996; Masco 2006; Kosek 2006). Today, over 70%
of Rio Arriba County, where the Espaola Valley sits, is classied as federal land.
Memories and sentiments regarding land loss remain powerful tropes, not only for
generations of Hispanos land-grant activists who remain in a struggle to regain land,
but for the population more broadly, who draw on the history of land loss to narrate
experiences of despair. As Jake Kosek points out, these lost or stolen lands produce
a shared idiom of longing that has become central to cohesiveness and boundaries of
both community and individual identity. People remember and remake the past
through acts of memory that bring the meaning of the past to bear on conditions and
politics of the present, and vice versa (2006: 60). In the Espaola Valley, land has been
an emblematic gure for ideas and experiences of love and loss. Over the past 20 years,
the aggrieved discourse of Hispano land loss has come to index increases in heroin use
and overdose. Heroin users and their families are likely to weave details about the
dispossession of their land and property into intimate stories about loved ones who
died of heroin overdose or their own struggles with addiction.
Today, most Hispanos are forced to commute long distances to work low-wage
service-sector jobs. Whatever inherited land remains is increasingly sold to survive,
creating tensions within many families. Between 2002 and 2007, Hispano land holdings
declined by four million acres, reecting the stark economic pressures they face (US
Census Bureau, 2010). The land, ever present but out of reach, produces an idiom of
loss and longing that expresses both the cohesiveness and ssures of family life. Indeed,
it is a witness to another time and to the death of a way of life.
To a certain extent, todays multigenerational household is a form of connection that
seems to have survived this collapse, as it enables kin to continue to live together and contribute to the care of the household and each other. But this traditional living arrangement
has been enmeshed in pressures from property loss, high rates of incarceration, addiction
and institutional neglect. Against the backdrop of these pressures, these households carry
an overwhelming responsibility for the care of its members. The heroin-addicted household has been torn open by the cumulative losses of the past, but it also demands that it
cohere in the present, even as the present incites more losses through addiction. These
losses, in turn, weave kin relations together ever more tightly, and unravel them as well.
In my research, motherdaughter and fatherson dyads of intergenerational heroin
use were more common than motherson or fatherdaughter.3 This pattern could be
related to a range of factors, including household composition, gender norms, sex
differences in employment and rates of incarceration, among others. However, both
3

During my research, I followed one motherson heroin-using dyad. They did not live in the same
household and our engagement was cut short when the son was incarcerated in Colorado, an event
that points to one of the factors that may shape gendered patterns of heroin use.

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Hispano men and women framed addiction as a phenomenon of loss, connection and
love. This framing folds the past into the present, and affect into materiality, mobilising
each for different purposes. As I elaborate below, it is through the simultaneity of
objects (land and drugs), emotions (loss and love), and generations (parent and child)
that heroin addiction emerges as a form of querencia.

Presence in the esh

Heroin in the Espaola Valley can be traced back to the 1940s, when some Hispano men,
stripped of their land and livelihood, sought temporary work in Los Angeles. Their
migration coincided with the establishment of Los Alamos National Laboratories in
1943, which profoundly altered the Valleys cultural and economic landscape (Masco
2006), and the formalisation of heroin distribution networks along the MexicoUS
border (Astorga 2003). Culturally marked, Hispano migrant men tended to live in
Mexican-American barrios where heroin was prevalent. During interviews with me, a
few of them, now well into their 70s, recounted returning to the Espaola Valley from
Los Angeles with an addiction to heroin. Others recalled returning home from the
Vietnam War a generation later, also addicted to heroin. At that time, 20% of lowranking military personnel from Vietnam, which comprised the majority of Hispano
draftees, were addicted to the drug (McCoy 1991).
The rst epidemiological studies of heroin addiction in the Espaola Valley were
conducted in the early 1990s, coinciding with the escalation of the nations War on
Drugs. During this time, the western-USA heroin market became dominated by very
pure and highly addictive Mexican black tar heroin (Ciccarone 2009). Signicantly,
the Espaola Valley is part of the old Camino Real, the historic trade route that
connected Mexico City to the northernmost outposts of New Spain. Now referred
to as I-25, it transports products from Mexico to the USA, including heroin.
From 1974 onward, in a series of stops and starts, addiction recovery programmes
were established in the Espaola Valley. Many of these programmes were led by landgrant activists, suggesting their leadership roles in community affairs, as well as the valleys
improvised response to the problem of drug addiction. These land-activist-turnedaddiction providers proposed a connection between the regions history of dispossession
and its growing problem of addiction. They developed a discourse of causality through
idioms of agrarian struggle. Addicted youth were untended elds, and lost sheep, both
references to the Hispano working landscape a generation or more removed.
Activist-providers exclaimed that Hispano lives had been stolen not by drugs; rather, they
had been stolen by colonialism. Such congurations of addiction enabled a connection
between past and present struggles. It might be tempting to dismiss such narratives and
to retreat to prevailing discourses of personal choice and individual responsibility, as some
Hispanos do. But, as one land activist-provider poignantly described, we are surrounded
by beauty that we can no longer see [because] we have been blinded by drugs, despair
and private property. Such an observation demands a broader response to addiction, one
that includes social and economic exploitation and cultural disintegration as causal factors
(Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Singer 2012).
The connection between dispossession and addiction is sometimes alluded to in
scholarly and public discourses but is rarely a central concern (Garcia 2010 Reichelt
2001; Trujillo 2009). Perhaps this is because there is no smooth translation between
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the political sphere of the Hispano past and its embodied present. Yet, we might
approach heroin addiction as a kind of psychic protest to, or symptom of, the erosion
of the boundaries between past and present, the political and the corporeal (Biehl and
Moran 2009). Indeed, it is in the context of persistent experiences of dispossession and
the consequent disintegration of longstanding genealogical ties central to Hispano
kinship, especially land inheritance, that intergenerational heroin use emerges as a
practice and principle of connection, even repair. It is, however, a practice that
perpetuates the very injuries it seeks to remedy, for familial property in the traditional
sense (land, houses) is often the precondition for new addictive properties (drugs,
heroin-related scars). For many families in the Espaola Valley, kin relations are now
attached to and routed through these new associations of property and forms of
inheritance that travel via heroin. In this shift, addiction functions as the heritable
thing, linking (and sometimes separating) family members.

Blood relations
The claim that intergenerational heroin addiction represents a reworked form of Hispano querencia raises questions about the nature of what is bequeathed and received.
In considering these questions, I return to the concepts of substance and sentiment,
which have been central to anthropological renditions of Euro-American kinship.
Discussions of substance as blood, especially, run through much of the anthropological literature on kinship (Schneider 1980 [1968]; Carsten 2011; Franklin and
McKinnon 2001). I would like to briey consider the signicance of blood in the
Hispano milieu for its insights into the changing formation of querencia overtime.
Like many cultures, Hispano congurations of kinship are primarily based on
ideas of blood. But blood conjures up a constellation of symbols, social relations
and historical referents that are not especially concerned with issues of kinship per
se. For example, Hispanos often speak of themselves as having Spanish blood in order
to declare their difference from Native Americans and Anglos. Such assertions can be
traced to the Spanish concept of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) and colonial
Mexicos caste system (sistema de castas), a hierarchical system of social organisation
based on ancestry. Transplanted to New Mexico and adapted to its colonial conditions,
these discourses were employed to determine levels of privilege, power and honour
according to descent (Gutirrez 1984; Martnez 2011).
The US occupation and annexation of New Mexico dramatically reshaped ethnic
relations and identities and negated Hispanos genealogical claims to land. Yet, blood
has remained constitutive of Hispano identity, especially as a means to articulate
Hispanos enduring identication with the land (Nieto-Philips 2004). Many
Hispanos speak of carrying the land in their blood (llevar la tierra en la sangre),
thereby connecting the materiality of the physical body with that of land. Blood is
often presented as the vehicle through which cultural characteristics and traditions
are transmitted from one generation to the next. In this sense, blood is a metaphor
for the indoctrination and endurance of certain beliefs and practices, not a biological
process.
It is perhaps no coincidence that ideas and images of blood suffuse the local landscape: the mountains that hug the Espaola Valley are named the Sangre de Cristo
(Blood of Christ) Mountains; irrigation ditches are sangrias (veins), tree sap is sangre
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(blood), to name a few examples. Regional proverbs also draw on the rich symbolism
of blood. For example, la primavera la sangre altera (literally, the sap rises in the
Spring) celebrates the advent of spring after long winter months. Or, la sangre sin
fuego hierve (literally, blood boils without a re), alludes to the strength of family
bonds. These examples illustrate the signicance of blood and the way it is elaborated
in the context of natural and domestic worlds.
The phenomenon of heroin addiction has multiplied bloods symbolic and affective
meanings. Hispanos typically inject heroin directly into a vein. The rituals of injection
(nding a vein, getting a bit of blood to ow into the syringe before injecting, shooting
the heroin into the vein) often take place within the household. Users often describe the
physiological effects of this process as a force of love, with heroin embracing the body
(me abraza), relieving pain and promoting feelings of belonging and wellbeing. Heroin
may thus be understood as a substance that nourishes and strengthens the bonds between
kin. In this process, negative feelings and associations accompanying drug use are
lessened, an affective transfer put into motion by the very rhythms of addiction itself.
Commemorative and generative, the physical marks and scars that result from heroin
use materialise the connection between kin.
Yet, veins may collapse or become permanently scarred, leading to sickness and
negative associations. Indeed, the physical damage associated with heroin use is
sometimes analogous with damaged personal relationships and the existence of bad
blood between kin. Here the interpenetration of physiological and metaphorical
meanings of blood highlights how heroin is simultaneously a source of vitality and
danger, connection and disconnection.
The multiple symbolic registers of blood intersect and amplify in other ways as
well. Bobby, a young, heroin-addicted father from the Espaola Valley described
bloods constitutive role in Hispanos identication with the land, as well as the connectedness of kin. When I was little I believed soil owed through our veins. Thats
what my pops said to me back then. Lleva el suelo en las venas, mijo.
As Bobby narrated to me the story of his fathers life, it became clear how heroin
use was oriented to healing loss and pain, and that its potentially stabilising force was
directed to strengthening links to the past and to each other. For example, Bobby
recalled how his father left home before sunrise to work at a gravel mine located in
the Espaola Valley. Like many Hispanos, Bobbys father loathed the mine, which
he believed compromised the agricultural nature of the region, as well as the health
of those who laboured in it. Although his father often spoke about leaving the pit, local jobs were in short supply and the other skills his father had were agricultural, which
no longer provided a means to live. Moreover, Bobbys father suffered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, which had mutilated his hands. My pops could drive a tractor
but he couldnt pick an apple, Bobby said plaintively.
Eventually, the gravel mine closed. To make ends meet, Bobbys father sold the
remaining 3 acres of land he had inherited from his own father. It was in this context that
his father began to use heroin. Bobby vividly described how, at the age of 14, he learned
to cook heroin and inject his father with the drug. The rst couple of times he talked me
through it. I was so scared Id hurt him, or kill him. But he was a good teacher, you know?
He learned to shoot heroin during the war [Vietnam] and he taught me everything he knew.
According to Bobby, heroin relieved his fathers pain and improved their relationship.
Under the effects of the drug, Bobbys father taught him to cultivate the sliver of land that
was on the side of their modest adobe house:
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We planted some corn, some chile. Hed sit or sleep between the crops. Rest in
the little rows, you know? Sometimes Id sit with him and hed tell me about
the old days. Like about what his pops grew, or going out hunting or cutting
wood in the Sangres (Sangre de Cristo Mountains).
Bobby began injecting himself with heroin when he was 17 years old, his father by
his side.
At the time of this conversation, Bobbys father had recently died of a heart attack.
Meanwhile, Bobby was using heroin more frequently, which caused friction between
him and his mother and girlfriend, all of whom lived together in the house with the side
garden. Bobby stood to inherit the house after his mothers death. In a tearful moment
he told me that, although he tried, he worried that his fathers garden would not thrive
under his care alone.
I share this narrative because it illuminates the way blood, land and heroin mix and
ow. It is an example of the complex entanglement of weaving substance and sentiment
in Hispano congurations of inheritance, and their changing expression and meaning
through time. Like blood or land, I suggest that heroin is a generative substance that
binds kin together in enduring ways, partly due to the emotions of love and loss that
are attached to it.
In what follows, I reect in more detail on the nuances of love and loss and their
connection to intergenerational addiction. Concretised in practices and expressions
associated with intergenerational heroin use, I argue familial congurations of addiction are far from determinable as moral failing or biogenetic disorder, as they are often
dened in juridical and medical discourses. Rather, I show how intergenerational
addiction emerges as a threshold between rupture and continuity, injury and care. I
focus below on a relationship of a mother and daughter, Eugenia and Bernadette.
Without lling out a complete picture of their relationship, I hope to show how it
opens up horizons for contemplating the possibilities and risks of an inheritance that
functions through addiction.

Reunion
I began this investigation in 2004, shortly after Bernadette was charged with a felonylevel offence related to drugs. Prior to her trial, she was ordered to the rural drug recovery programme where I worked as an ethnographer and clinical staff.4 While she was
there, I observed Bernadettes month-long stay during my work on the night shift
and often attended to her basic needs, like providing food or medications or dialling
the telephone for her outgoing calls. It was during casual conversations at the clinic that
I rst learned that her mother Eugenia was also addicted to heroin. I also learned that
Bernadette had two children, an estranged teenage son and a young daughter, Ashley,
who lived with her until her arrest.
4

I rst came into contact with Bobby and Bernadette through my work at the detox clinic, where
they had been admitted for treatment for heroin addiction. While they identied with the notion
of being addicted, their experience of addiction was qualitatively different from the physiological
and psychological denition of addiction utilised by expert knowledges. My use of the term addiction is more aligned with Bobby and Bernadettes evolving experience of heroin use than it is a predetermined understanding of what addiction is.

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On the day of Bernadettes release from the clinic, an electronic monitoring

bracelet was attached to her ankle and she was conned to her trailer until her
impending trial date. I visited Bernadette often during this period; I brought her
groceries and cigarettes and she told me stories about her life. These stories often
centred on another time, well before she started using heroin, when she and Eugenia
lived in their ancestral village, in their ancestral home. Bernadette spoke lovingly about
the home and the happy events that took place within it. But the bucolic image of the
house and the quaint memories of it stood in tension with the other stories Bernadette
eventually told me: her recollections of her mothers declining mental health; their
deepening poverty and her own growing loneliness and worry.
When Bernadette was 12, Eugenia sold the beloved ancestral home and the two
relocated to a rented trailer in a neighbouring town. At the age of 13, she began
working in order to contribute to the running of the new household. Bernadette
recalled that, at the time, there was only one recovery programme in the area and no
mental health services, despite the increasing awareness of the growing heroin problem.
Thus, mother and daughter crafted their own services by caring for each other. In
interviews, Bernadette described how she watched and cared for Eugenia during her
bouts with las malias (literally, maladies) pains that are produced through and treated
with heroin. This often meant scoring medicina (heroin) for her mother, often from a
relative. I wanted her to feel better, entiendes? [do you understand?] I was afraid she
was going to die, entiendes? I loved my mom and I was afraid and the only thing
you can do in that situation is help get them high. Bernadette said everything would
go back to normal once her mother was high Eugenia would stop crying, hold
Bernadette, and promise that things would get better. Her narrative reveals the affective
and corporeal polarities of addiction and the reparative nature of heroin in family
relations. Heroin sutured pain and fear, guilt and hope, while casting a profound
shadow that tied mother and daughter together ever more tightly.
At 16, Bernadette began smoking heroin with a boyfriend. Soon she began
injecting the drug intravenously, at which point her mother became her primary drug
partner. Many second-generation addicts described the transition from using heroin
with non-kin to a parent as a natural or normal one. That is, their drug use was
bound up in a familial and thus familiar world that, while often precarious, nevertheless
persisted unlike the more eeting and often threatening relations with lovers and
friends. It was through kin relations that heroin users are most able to experience their
addiction as existential normalcy.
For the next 15 years Eugenia and Bernadette used heroin together. The dependencies
produced through the drug became a part of their relational mix and the circulation of
heroin became a substance, if you will, through which care was performed and kin ties
between them were reafrmed. Bernadette described:
It [heroin] brought us closer together. Because shes my mother and she
understands me and I understand her She gets my whole body, the highs
and lows, gets me when I feel down for needing this [heroin] We feel these
things together. Its just a very close feeling. Its very close and very heavy
This is how life is for us. Its heavy but its close.
The closeness and heaviness Bernadette describes is an intermediate space where
suffering, stigma and release intertwine. Traversing these states together, mother and
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daughter negotiate a space between injury and repair, addiction and love, revealing
these to be mutually constitutive, not agonistic. The renewal of shared recognition
and feeling enabled by drugs and the rituals involving them underwrites delity
between heroin-using kin. This hold is as much ethical as it is biological. Over time,
it becomes a strategy for living.
Bernadette was incarcerated in 2006. I spoke with and visited her and her mother
on several occasions during their period. Tell her I love her, one would say of the
other pressing into my hand a letter, a photo, or money for me to deliver. These
transactions had powerful affective resonance and I observed how this resonance (the
words, the things) at once collapsed and highlighted the distance between the two
women. Like heroin, the objects were meant to offer some comfort, but they carried
with them an acknowledgement of the very injuries they sought to relieve, especially
the pain of separation.
Bernadette was paroled in 2008 and reunited with her daughter. Shortly after
returning to the Espaola Valley, she resumed using heroin with her mother. The three
generations lived together in a small apartment in a sprawling low-income complex in
Espaola, located a few miles west of the village of the Martnez ancestral home.
Although it had been over 20 years since they had lived there, the home lived on in
photographs taped to the apartments thin walls.
Despite their heroin use, Eugenia and Bernadette consistently attended the local
womens recovery group, which I often observed as a part of my research. One meeting
in particular stands out in my mind as offering especially rich resources for reecting
on inheritance through addiction. It took place on a hot, late summer evening. About
20 women were crammed into a small room, sitting on tattered couches and chairs.
The conversation turned to the topic of the reddish abscess, or the corona (literally
crown), that erupted on Bernadettes arm. The groups facilitator lectured the women
on safe injection practices, wound prevention and care measures already well known.
While she spoke, Bernadette traced her corona and quietly countered that she was
born this way that is, born addicted and, presumably, with heroin-induced scars.
Her interpretation of her corona as a kind of unchosen gift emphasised how her story
was profoundly entangled with the stories of others situated similarly, namely her
mother. This density of narrative, these histories and afnities, had claimed and
enshrined themselves in her body in ways that she could not imagine, or perhaps even
hope to undo.
During this exchange another woman revealed her skin, which was also scarred
from years of injecting heroin. She admitted that she took comfort in her scars because
they connected her to family members she had loved and lost to heroin, including her
mother. In these congurations, injured skin is far more than infected skin to be
prevented through behavioural modication. Rather, it is an eneshment that conjoins
previous and present worlds, parent and child. The wounds of ones own esh are
linked to a relation with ones kin and to feelings for them (Povinelli 2006). Abscesses
are jewels, passed from one generation to another, imbued with family history,
memory and emotion.
It was an especially intense meeting. At the end of it, Bernadette asked if I could
drive them back to their apartment in Espaola. We piled into my car, Eugenia beside
me in the passenger seat, and Bernadette in the back, where she quickly fell asleep. As
we approached a fork in the road, Eugenia asked me to slow down and then to stop. I
pulled to the side of the road, and we were parked across the street from the house that
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Eugenia had inherited from her father, Eugenio. Eugenio worked as a weaver and a
farmer, selling his wares from his home. Both were trades he had inherited from his
own father, who had also inherited them and so the story goes for generations.
However, Eugenio was the rst of the Martnezes who had not inherited the land upon
which these inherited practices were based.
We stared at the houses peeling adobe walls, the dented tin roof and the neglected
trees in the front yard that still bore fruit. Eugenia was born in the house her father had
inherited. Her mother died in it when Eugenia, the eldest and only daughter, was a
child, making her la duea, the woman of the house. She raised Bernadette there until
she was 12 years old. The house materialised affective and political histories and a
multigenerational struggle to construct what Eugenia often described as a decent life
in the face of increasing economic scarcity.
Memories of past houses are not just personally evocative, redolent of kinship,
Janet Carsten writes, [They] also carry with them wider political signicance and
must be understood in juxtaposition to the dislocations of history (2004: 345).
Sitting beside Eugenia as she stared at her ancestral home, I was struck by the
connections between the losses that the Martnez family had endured and by their
attempts to keep memory, family and continuity itself alive. These memories and
the feelings associated with them are anchored in histories (of struggle and loss), sites
(a home), feelings (of love and longing) and in the physical wounds that appear on the
bodies of kin (the corona). A new notion of inheritance to be bequeathed and received
seemed to be coming into being, and it emerged from the body itself.

Fa mily ties
In her story Family Ties, Clarice Lispector writes about the recognition of the forces
that bind one to kin. In a passage about a woman creating the same affective bonds with
her young son that she shares with her own mother, Lispector writes, Who would ever
know at what moment the mother transferred her inheritance to her child. And with
what morose pleasure. Now mother and son were understanding each other within
the mystery they shared (1972: 123).
It would be easy to interpret the scene in the recovery group and the nature of the
addictive ties that are being bestowed in the Espaola Valley as mere dysfunction
more morose than pleasure. However, in considering these ties, we benet from the
implications of Lispectors double-edged notion of inheritance and the valences of
querencia. Lispector brings the mystery and emotion of connection back into
inheritance and querencia opens it up as an ethical space calling for reection. Both
have much to teach us about blurring the lines that have become sharpened in
contemporary explanations of addiction as the result of biology or disposition on the
one hand, or politics and history on the other. We might also read this blurriness as
a move toward greater clarity, where addiction and love are revealed as vital forms of
connection that link kin together via the past and present worlds.
Recall that querencia denotes love and heritage. From land and labour, to loss
and addiction, querencia shifts over time. But if we look closely, there are
moments when the past and present mix, bringing into view overlapping objects,
desires and relations. Like a child resting in a garden with his heroin-using father,
or a woman perceiving kinship in her heroin-related wounds. In ethnographically
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attending to these scenes, we see that the domains of loss and inheritance, like love
and addiction, cannot be kept separate.
The narratives that anchor this article reveal the complex negotiations of families
trying to remain connected in the context of ongoing loss. They also highlight the
possibilities and dangers that lie at the heart of inheritance making. For many families
in the Espaola Valley, kin relations are now attached to and routed through new
associations of property and forms of inheritance that travel via heroin. This article
has sought to understand this re-routing as a kind of generational reckoning that
involves a myriad of inscriptions, transmissions and erasures located in a deeper politics
of the state. It has also argued that in the practice of parents and children using heroin
together, and in conceptualising addiction as inherited, lost and wounded forms of life
are regenerated; life that may now have present physical need as horizon, but that
remains thoroughly historical, social and intersubjective. My hope is that these insights
might offer a way of understanding the unfolding of addiction within families over
time, and of the corresponding and ever-changing ties that unfurl in relations of kin.
Angela Garcia
Department of Anthropology
Stanford University 450
Serra Mall Main Quad,
Bldg 50, Stanford, CA
94305-2034, USA
garcia2@stanford.edu

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