Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade

by Chellis Glendinning

Overview

"Chiva" is street slang for heroin-and heroin is a hot topic.

Its use as a narcotic is on a precipitous rise. Worldwide heroin production has doubled in the last decade, and the United Nations estimates more than fifteen million users are addicted-up to three million in the United States. It's big business, too, with yearly global sales of 0 billion-up to billion in the U.S. Enmeshed with terrorism, crime, government collaboration, corporate globalization, and the spread of HIV, the opiate trade is inextricably entangled with the functioning of global society. Finally, heroin is controversial because of the on-going debates about solutions to the health, social and economic havoc it creates.

Chiva uses creative nonfiction to merge the global epic of heroin trafficking with the human-scale story of its presence in the small desert town that boasts the most per-capita overdose deaths in the U.S. The book interweaves three themes:

• The true tale of Chimayo, New Mexico, terrorized by its heroin dealers since the 1970s until, in the late '90s, its citizens rose up to challenge the epidemic in their midst.
• The story of the author's relationship with a local dealer, and his involvement with addiction, crime, love, recovery and the judicial system.
• The political context behind these stories: the global workings of the heroin production business.

Compelling, disturbing, yet hopeful, Chiva is both personal and political, revealing the relationship between colonization and drug abuse, and the importance of reclaiming sustainable culture as a key to recovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550923391
Publisher:	New Society Publishers
Publication date:	02/01/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Chellis Glendinning is a psychotherapist and award-winning author whose works include the acclaimed Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade -both of which won National Federation of Press Women book awards. She also wrote When Technology Wounds , which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, Glendinning's specialty is the ecological and human costs of technological progress. She lives in rural New Mexico where she works for environmental justice and cultural preservation.

Chellis Glendinning is a psychotherapist and award-winning author whose works include the acclaimed Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade-both of which won National Federation of Press Women book awards. She also wrote When Technology Wounds, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, Glendinning's specialty is the ecological and human costs of technological progress. She lives in rural New Mexico where she works for environmental justice and cultural preservation.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Endnotes
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This time it takes a village to see the world. Chellis Glendinning vividly shows through the lens of Chimayó, New Mexico, that local death can come from global policies. And that the solutions start in our own hearts and neighborhoods. This book gives us the heroin questions we will all have to answer."
— Charles Bowden, author of Down By The River

"Chiva is a book of extraordinary complexity and poetical imagination, a narrative that challenges our assumptions about the site of healing and the possibilities of belief, without letting us forget that there is no healing without social justice. A text that both inspires and radicalizes for social change."
— Marjorie Agosín, professor, Wellesley College, author of At the Threshold of Memory and Poems for Josefina

"In a sensitve and fluid way, Glendinning reveals the relationship between economies and cultures in a globalized world through the commodity heroin, whose consumption has caused so much pain in her community in New Mexico. Given the failure of the US's double-standard anti-drug policy, she puts her hopes in a different strategy: the humanistic approach of harm reduction, recovery of local cultural traditions, and cohesion of community."
—Luís Astorga, sociologist, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Autonomous University of Mexico)

"Chiva weaves personal experience and the healing process of resistance with the effects of drug addiction and colonization in the context of global economic and political control. A powerful text that ratifies Chellis Glendinning as one of the most genuine narrative voices and lucid minds of current American literature."
— Jesús Sepúlveda, author of The Garden of Peculiarities

"Chiva is an excellent book by a gifted and compassionate writer who does a good job as an "outsider" in getting "inside" the life of tecatos and of the culture in general. I like her sophisticated link between rural, sacred place and the global heroin trade."
— Tomás Atencio, sociologist, University of New Mexico

"Chiva, the book, will be controversial. People locally and nationally will protest, but more will sing its praises as setting a blueprint for hope. I was so taken by the skillful interweaving of four story lines that I laughed and cried, and cursed: the global legitimating of illicit drug profits assisted by political ends and greed; the valiant worldwide fight of land-based peoples against these very ends; the heart wrenching struggle to cleanse the soul of Northern New Mexico from heroin's destructiveness; and the poignant love story between the author and the addict. I read the book in one sitting."
— W. Azul La Luz B., medical sociologist, University of New Mexico

"Chiva offers a compelling analysis of the human toll extracted by addiction, while providing a paradigm shift towards treatment based on communal responsibility and the power of the people — all of which can be extrapolated to "Small Town Anywhere, North America."
— Chris Goble, coordinator of a youth withdrawal management program, Victoria, Canada

"Finally, someone has gotten the guts to lay out the bare facts about what heroin is doing to the latinos of northern New Mexico."
— Juan Estevan Arellano, journalist, author of Inocencio: Ni pica ni escarda pero siempre de come el mejor elote