Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Northern New Mexico is rich with tradition and beauty — pinon nut gathering, pilgrimages to a church known for its healing powers, dramatic landscapes captured on canvas by Georgia O’Keeffe. But another, darker tradition scars the lives of its residents — heroin addiction, at a rate four times the national average.

The New York Times just ran a story examining this drug plague. The article quotes Angela Garcia, an anthropologist who in 2006 wrote a deeply personal story for HCN about the same topic (”Land of Disenchantment” won that year’s Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Award for reporting on drug and alcohol use). Angela described the messy and painful lives of addicts and their needless deaths from overdoses, and traces the drug use to a profound sense of loss among the Hispanic people of the region, whose families were pushed off their historical land grant properties more than a century ago:

Today, the Valley’s residents, many of whom are land-grant “heirs,” complain that their land was flat-out stolen. Decades-long battles to reclaim that land are still tied up in the courts. (Of course, these lands were also stolen from Native Americans by Spanish conquerors. And the Pueblo tribes in the Española Valley suffer a similar rate of addiction.)

The cruel irony is that the land that was “lost” is still there. Every Hispano can see it. It is upon the land grants that Los Alamos is built, that developers build adobe chalets for the upper middle class. And this is the land that is endlessly subdivided for mobile homes, the only “affordable housing” for the working poor in northern New Mexico today.

We’re glad that another paper is calling national attention to this sad epidemic and the injustice that feeds it.