School of Humanities and Sciences


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  • Angela Garcia

    Angela Garcia

    Associate Professor of Anthropology

    BioProfessor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.

    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) examines how violence precedes and functions in the ways families seek to care for and protect each other. Central to this work are anexos (annexes), informal and coercive rehabilitation clinics for the treatment of drug addiction that are run and utilized by the working poor, and which incorporate violence into their therapeutic practices. Anexos are widespread across Mexico and are widely condemned as abusive, illegal, ineffective, and unethical. By situating anexos within a larger social and historical frame, and closely attending to life within and beyond these spaces, Garcia shows that anexos provide refuge from the catastrophic and everyday violence associated with the drug war. The book also demonstrates that anexos are the leading resource for the treatment of drug addiction among Mexico’s poor, and are an essential space of protection for individuals at risk of the intensifying violence in Mexico.

    Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) received awards in anthropology and writing. The Pastoral Clinic explores the relationship between intergenerational heroin use, poverty and colonial history in northern New Mexico. It argues that heroin addiction among Hispanos is a contemporary expression of an enduring history of dispossession, social and intimate fragmentation, and the existential desire for a release from these. Ongoing work in the U.S. explores processes of legal “re-entry” and intimate repair that incarcerated and paroled drug users undertake, particularly within kin networks.

    Currently, Garcia is studying the environmental, social, and bodily effects resulting from Mexico City’s ongoing desagüe, the massive drainage project initiated by Spanish colonists in the seventeenth century in the Valley of Mexico. Mexico City’s desagüe speaks to some of the most pressing concerns of our time: water scarcity, humans’ relationship to changing ecologies, and chronic disease. This project examines how the desagüe remakes bodies, neighborhoods, and social worlds.

  • M. Elizabeth Grávalos

    M. Elizabeth Grávalos

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Anthropology

    BioDr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist with over a decade of fieldwork and lab experience. Located at the intersection of materiality, landscape, and craft production, her research centers on the politics and sociality of making and using ceramic and textile objects. Dr. Grávalos is interested in how artisans embody, share, and contest technological and landscape knowledge across generations and between communities. Most recently, her work has focused on Casma potters on Peru's north coast (ca. 700-1440 CE) and Recuay artisans (100-700 CE) in Peru's north highlands.

    Since 2014, Dr. Grávalos has applied material science methods to the analysis of archaeological materials, including ceramic, glass, and stone. She is a specialist in laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and thin section petrography.

    She also conducts community-based archaeological fieldwork in Peru. Most recently, Dr. Grávalos co-directed the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica de Jecosh (PIAJ; Jecosh Archaeological Research Project) in highland Ancash, Peru, with colleagues Denisse Herrera Rondan and Emily A. Sharp. Learn more about this collaborative project with the descendant community of Jecosh/Poccrac here: https://www.facebook.com/PIAJecosh