The Lady From Chimayo

By Robert Allen, AlterNet. Posted May 3, 2005.

A sprawling village, home to about 3,000 people, Chimayo is the spiritual centre of the Río Grande in the upland desert of northern New Mexico. Every Easter thousands of pilgrims trek by foot to the edge of Chimayo where they rest at a Christian sanctuary (El Santuario) to pray. It's a procession rooted in the earthly pagan history of the village.

On a Saturday morning in May 1999, a new date was etched into the spiritual history of Chimayo. The villagers -- despairing that their village had the most drug dealers and users in the county, Río Arriba, with the most drug overdose deaths per capita in the U.S. and increasing numbers of drug-related killings -- came together on an interfaith procession to pray for the end of the violence from drugs and alcohol. Catholic, Tewa, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Aztec, Pentacostal and Protestant marched along the highway to the Santuario, 450 people with a collective voice that screamed, needing to be heard.

Yet the local, state and federal authorities didn't hear the scream, didn't seem to care and didn't appear to want to do anything about the drug culture in Chimayo -- the drug-related robberies, the deaths, the murders, the fear. Then, out of the wide blue sky beyond the desert -- four months after the procession, on Sept. 29, 1999, an army of 150 officers -- local, state, Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI -- raided the homes of five drug dealers. Some say it changed Chimayo forever. Some say it was a watershed for drug-culture USA.

Chellis Glendinning, author of the award-winning Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy, lives in Chimayo, with its diverse mountain mix of Spanish, Mexican native, local Pueblo Indian, Lebanese, French, Greek and Anglo-American.

"I fit right into this north New Mexico Chicano world," she writes. "Or at least I do now that I have navigated the inevitable hurdles and the hoops thrust into my face during my first decade [she moved to Chimayo in 1993]. Not the least of these hurdles has been the drug world -- the trafficking, shooting up, syringes along the riverbank, bulgaries, throat-slittings, police presence, and prison culture associated with the abuse of chiva [the street slang for heroin]."

Glendinning fits right in because she counts as her friends in Chimayo chile farmers, community organizers and state troopers among bank robbers, ex-cons and drug dealers. "I have learned to open my heart to a wisdom that does not flee from suffering, breakdown, or error," she writes. "Rather the wisdom of this place knows these aspects of life as inseparable from job, triumph, and communion."

She argues that such wisdom is needed, especially when it comes to dealing with the complexities of the global heroin trade and its impact on the land-based communities that are forced to grow opium, the raw source of heroin, and the rural and urban communities and individuals who are affected by its consumption and abuse.

The author had become involved in the "passions of living" in Chimayo, and then, "as an afterthought" she was inspired to write about what she had seen. Because of her approach to the subject, her consequent book, Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade, courted controversy before it hit the bookstores.

Glendinning's approach was to take the local (the victimization of the users and the exploitation of the growers) and place them in the context of globalization. The heroin trade, Glendinning quickly realized, was not a social sideshow on the periphery of society. She writes: "Through a daunting history of collusion between traffickers, business and banking institutions, governments and military dating back to the British Empire, the illicit drug trade has come to be essential to the accumulation of capital that fuels the expansion and plunder we call corporate globalization."

What makes the book instantly political and deeply personal is the way that Glendinning experienced the impact of the global heroin trade in Chimayo. "Chiva," she says, "is the story of the global heroin trade woven into the tale of my love affair with a former drug dealer -- all in the service of the telling of the uprising my village undertook to rout out our heroin epidemic."

That uprising started in earnest with the procession in 1999 to the Santuario and has continued with a program Glendinning insists is community-led, "local people rising up using resources, ideas, values, strengths, and means that are peculiar to their place and history."

If the story of the community response to the drug epidemic in Chimayo is controversial, this is because, she argues, of the entrenchment of drug epidemics in society. "Like that of any imperial system, [it] always has the effect of fragmenting community into opposing predicaments, survival strategies, and factions. What we've done in New Mexico occurred by a convergence of domestic 'drug war' advocates, legalization activists, prohibitionists, police, federal drug agents, a right-wing governor, 12-step recovery professionals, department of health officials, behavioural health workers, drug addicts, former dealers, teetotalers, Aztecs, Catholics, aetheists, mothers of children killed by drug violence, you-name-it. My job was to reflect what the community did and its many perspectives."

Robert Allen is a contributing editor of Blue, where this article originally appeared.

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