Bio

Research Area(s)
Culture and Society
Environmental Anthropology
Gender and Sexuality
Medical Anthropology
Political Anthropology and Political Economy
Race, Ethnicity, and Collective Identity
Materiality

Field of Interest(s)
Violence
Addiction
Kinship
Care
Environment
Landscape
Writing

Professor Garcia works at the intersection of violence, care, and form, asking how suffering is both endured and narrated, and what is at stake, ethically and politically, in the telling. Her research focuses on the intimate lives of the dispossessed and on the attachments, affects, and daily practices through which they work to hold their worlds together against forces designed to break them apart. Increasingly, her work has turned toward the ways ecological transformation, dispossession, and the built and unbuilt environment shape ethical and social life. Garcia is also attentive to narrative form as a means of apprehending historical and lived experience.

Garcia's most recent book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), takes readers inside Mexico City's anexos — informal, coercive rehabilitation clinics where the working poor treat drug addiction, and where violence itself is folded into the work of healing. Widely condemned as abusive, illegal, and unethical, anexos are nonetheless the primary resource for addiction treatment among Mexico's poor, spreading now across the United States as well. Garcia sets these spaces within the larger history and social fabric that produced them, showing how families turn to anexos not despite the violence of the drug war but because of it — as one of the only shelters available against a catastrophe that is at once historical, structural, and ongoing.

Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010), traced intergenerational heroin use among Hispanos in northern New Mexico back to a longer history of colonial dispossession — arguing that addiction there is less a private affliction than a collective, historically produced longing for connection and release.

Garcia's current projects extend this attention to land and its histories. The first project is a narrative nonfiction book titled The Devil's Backbone, which turns to Santa Rita del Cobre and the Chino Mine district near Silver City, New Mexico — a landscape scarred by conquest, extraction, and ecological ruin. Drawing on Garcia's own family history alongside ethnographic and archival research, the book brings back to life a racially segregated company town that was erased as the mine expanded. Moving from present to past, surface to subsurface, the book traces four generations of labor and loss experienced by Mexican and Mexican-American miners, unearthing new ways of thinking about environmental, social, and family history. It also reveals the difficult necessity of remaining resilient amid ongoing environmental and existential catastrophe.

The second project examines Mexico City's desagüe — the vast drainage project Spanish colonists began carving into the Valley of Mexico in the seventeenth century, and which continues, centuries later, to reshape the city's water, bodies, and disease. Still incomplete and still consequential, the desagüe becomes a lens onto some of the most urgent questions of our moment: water scarcity, the human entanglement with changing ecologies, and the slow violence of chronic illness. Garcia asks how this centuries-old engineering project continues to remake neighborhoods, bodies, and social worlds from underground up.

Garcia’s work has received major awards in anthropology and writing. She is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.

Academic Appointments

Program Affiliations

  • Center for Latin American Studies

Professional Education

  • Ph.D., Harvard University, Social Anthropology (2007)
  • B.A., University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology (1997)

Links

All Publications

  • The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life Death and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos Garcia, A. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024
  • The confessional community Narratives of violence and survival in Mexico City's<i> anexos</i> AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST Garcia, A. 2023

    View details for DOI 10.1111/amet.13204

    View details for Web of Science ID 001074621100001

  • Fragments of Relatedness: Writing, Archiving, and the Vicissitudes of Kinship ETHNOS Garcia, A. 2019

    View details for DOI 10.1080/00141844.2019.1645190

    View details for Web of Science ID 000478208200001

  • THE BLUE YEARS: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Garcia, A. 2016; 31 (4): 571-594

    View details for DOI 10.14506/ca31.4.06

    View details for Web of Science ID 000389218000006

  • Violence, addiction, recovery: An anthropological study of Mexico's anexos. Transcultural psychiatry Garcia, A., Anderson, B. 2016; 53 (4): 445-464

    Abstract

    Informal, coercive residential centers for the treatment of addiction are widespread and growing throughout Latin America. In Mexico these centers are called "anexos" and they are run and utilized by low-income individuals and families with problems related to drugs and alcohol. This article draws on findings from a 3-year anthropological study of anexos in Mexico City. Participant observation and in-depth interviews were used to describe and analyze anexos, their therapeutic practices, and residents' own accounts of addiction and recovery. Our findings indicate that poverty, addiction, and drug-related violence have fueled the proliferation of anexos They also suggest that anexos offer valuable health, social, and practical support, but risk exacerbating the suffering of residents through coercive rehabilitation techniques. Emphasizing this tension, this article considers the complex relationship between coercion and care, and poses fundamental questions about what drug recovery consists of in settings of poverty and violence.

    View details for DOI 10.1177/1363461516662539

    View details for PubMedID 27535824

  • The Blue Years: An Ethnogrpahy of a Prison Archive Cultural Anthropology Garcia, A. 2016; 31 (4): 572-595

    View details for DOI 10.14506/ca31.4.06

  • Serenity: Violence, Inequality, and Recovery on the Edge of Mexico City MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY Garcia, A. 2015; 29 (4): 455-472

    View details for DOI 10.1111/maq.12208

    View details for Web of Science ID 000368421600013

  • Serenity: Violence, Inequality, and Recovery on the Edge of Mexico City. Medical anthropology quarterly Garcia, A. 2015; 29 (4): 455-72

    Abstract

    Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in drug addiction in Mexico, especially among the urban poor. During the same period, unregulated residential treatment centers for addiction, known as anexos, have proliferated throughout the country. These centers are utilized and run by marginalized populations and are widely known to engage in physical violence. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article describes why anexos emerged, how they work, and what their prevalence and practices reveal about the nature of recovery in a context where poverty, drugs, and violence are existential realities. Drawing attention to the dynamic relationship between violence and recovery, pain, and healing, it complicates categories of violence and care that are presumed to have exclusive meaning, illuminating the divergent meanings of, and opportunities for, recovery, and how these are socially configured and sustained.

    View details for DOI 10.1111/maq.12208

    View details for PubMedID 25808246

  • 'Spirituality' and 'cultural adaptation' in a Latino mutual aid group for substance misuse and mental health. BJPsych bulletin Anderson, B. T., Garcia, A. 2015; 39 (4): 191-195

    Abstract

    A previously unknown Spanish-language mutual aid resource for substance use and mental health concerns is available in Latino communities across the USA and much of Latin America. This kind of '4th and 5th step' group is a 'culturally adapted' version of the 12-step programme and provides empirical grounds on which to re-theorise the importance of spirituality and culture in mutual aid recovery groups. This article presents ethnographic data on this organisation.

    View details for DOI 10.1192/pb.bp.114.048322

    View details for PubMedID 26755953

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC4706138

  • The Promise: On the Morality of the Marginal and the Illicit ETHOS Garcia, A. 2014; 42 (1): 51-64

    View details for DOI 10.1111/etho.12038

    View details for Web of Science ID 000332924900005

  • Regeneration: Life, Drugs and the Remaking of Hispano Inheritance Social Anthropology Garcia, A. 2014; 22 (2): 200-212

    View details for DOI 10.1111/1469-8676.12070

  • The Elegiac Addict, Revisited Addiction Trajectories Garcia, A. edited by Garriott, W., Reikhel, E. Duke University Press. 2013
  • Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (Book Review) AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST Book Review Authored by: Garcia, A. 2012; 114 (1): 160-161

    View details for DOI 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01413_4.x

    View details for Web of Science ID 000308312400021

  • Suffering Without Health Insurance The Progressive Magazine Garcia, A. 2011; 31-32
  • Reading Righteous Dopefiend with My Mother Anthropology Now Garcia, A. 2010; 2 (3): 31-36
  • The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande Garcia, A. University of California Press. 2010
  • The Elegiac Addict A Medical Anthropology Reader Garcia, A. edited by Good, B., Fischer, M., Willen, S., Good, M. D. Wiley-Blackwell. 2009
  • The Elegiac Addict: Addiction, Chronicity and the Melancholic Subject Cultural Anthropology Garcia, A. 2008; 23 (4): 718-746