Stanford University
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Angela Garcia
Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor of Environmental Anthropology
BioResearch 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. -
M. Elizabeth Grávalos
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioDr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist that studies Indigenous Andean communities in the deep past, for whom we have no written records. She looks at Andean ways of making things—like ceramics, textiles, and cordage—to understand the sociopolitics that undergirded these making practices, including engagements with specific substances and landscapes. With theoretical foci on materiality, ontology, and social practice, this research asks: what are the political affordances of specific materials? How did materials bridge possibilities for political action? How did people’s engagements with specific landscapes and materials impact power dynamics, economies, and social identities? To think through these questions, her work bridges humanities and science perspectives, blending insights from anthropological theory and cultural geography with material science techniques.
Dr. Grávalos’s research is based in the Ancash Region of northern Peru, where her ongoing investigation into political geologies considers how geologic resources are culturally made and valued, and how categorizations and use of these geomaterials foment political dynamics among pre-Hispanic and present-day Andean communities.
Dr. Grávalos is trained as a field archaeologist and materials analysis specialist. Since 2009, she has participated in and directed research projects in Peru, the Bahamas, and the city of Chicago (USA). She is committed to collaboration with descendant communities and centers community-based methodologies in her research. Dr. Grávalos is also an expert in ceramic compositional analysis (LA-ICP-MS and thin section petrography) as well as textile analysis.
