Analysis Of Angela Garcia's The Pastoral Clinic

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Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic is a riveting collection of illness narratives depicting the lives of heroin addicts, specifically in the underserved area of Espanola Valley, New Mexico. She genuinely provides her audience the reality behind a marginalized population that suffers from an addiction crisis as well as the presence of institutional structures that criminalize addicts for their illness. This paper will focus on care and chronicity as two central ideas of Garcia’s work from two lenses of understanding. The first lens is the Foucauldian approach to bio-power and bio-bureaucracies, a mode of analysis that the author utilizes quite sufficiently to support her argument of “restoring the embodied, economic and moral dynamics of addiction” (Garcia 2010, 10 ). This approach illustrates care as a product of chronicity and vice versa. The second lens is Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and resistance, a mode of analysis …show more content…

This medicalized interpretation of heroin addiction heavily emphasizes a constant state of suffering for those who are affected (Garcia 2010, 18). Furthermore, Nuevo Dia employees take this framework into account when contributing their efforts to treat addicts, on the premise that relapse will soon follow recovery (Garcia 2010, 13). When detox assistants assure themselves that their patients will return to the clinic, as if they never went through a period of treatment, one can expect that the quality of such to be drastically low. The cyclical pattern of inadequate therapies, temporary improvements in health and detrimental presuppositions all widen the health inequality gap in New Mexico. Garcia shares that the “interplay of biomedical and local discourses of chronicity compel dynamics of the Hispano heroin phenomenon,” which is evident in how the judicial system handles the social issue of addiction (2010,

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