Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade

In the interests of full-disclosure, I don't know author Chellis Glendinning, or anyone quoted or mentioned in this book, _Chiva_, but I took an interest in it when it was first published about five years ago. Like many people, I had read (years before) a Denver Post article about the Chimayo Valley drug problem but in connection with the healing pilgrimage to the Santuario. I probably shook my head about what a shame it was all that trouble in such a lovely valley with its green meadows and gaunt and haunted sand hills and surface appearance of Arcadian bliss. I had long been a student of post-colonial literature, of the effects of empire and imperialism (as regards former British colonies) but I was still largely a surface tourist when in the Taos area. The Labor Day weekend of September 1998, I was--again--a head-over-heels-passionate tourist to the Santuario de Chimayo; on returning home, I saw a news article about the murder that same weekend of one Danny Chavez near the Santuario church. I was shocked that guns and death had hit so close to me. On my next blissful tourist trip through the area, I sought out his grave marker and found it on a side road. That's been over ten years ago; at Christmas 2009, after having read _Chiva_ for the first time, I visited the area again, and passed by the Chavez marker (mentioned in _Chiva_, as I learned). This past holiday season the Chimayo valley from Espanola to Potrero was just as before, keeping its secrets from the passerby. Glendinning's work conveys exactly this combination of shock and tragedy beneath the tourist surface. Glendinning has the education and comprehensive first-world and "third-world" experience to thoroughly cover all the implications of the topic of drug use in the linked villages of the Chimayo Valley and the global connections. A reviewer of _Chiva_ for December 18, 2008, says the author was on a "rant" and "silly"--both insupportable opinions. Also, that reviewer states that every valley resident who shops at Wal-mart "participates democratically in globalization." Excuse me, but the Dubya Mart has a war room mentality which has been thoroughly documented. When the Dubya Mart beats out all other competitors, no one has a choice. Also, the loss of land, water rights, language, and dignity since 1846 is well documented. Perhaps the 12/18/08 reviewer would write a different review after more research, but as it is, she commits an error in logic when she assumes that wanting the land and water back is the same as going back to "medieval child mortality rates, rank illiteracy, and life expectancies of 40." Taos Pueblo would know something about that, something about wanting the land back without wanting genocide back. It's difficult to write a brief review about a book that means so much. The primary pleasure of _Chiva_ is Glendinning's way of showing Joaquin's roller coaster ride of post-traumatic stress disorder, and his decline after hopeful scenes. Her traci

I drive through Espanola a few times a year.....I remember hearing about how it was the heroin OD capital of the US...Always wanted to know what the real story was..so I bought the book...It is about 50% Chimayo and it's heroin problem and 50% of the GLOBAL heroin trade...With conspiracies, CIA, rebels, etc. thrown in..The organization is kinda weird...The writing style is kinda weird as well...but, she is a good a good writer.....I really liked the part about Chimayo, the march, The Great Bust of 1999, and the general description of live in Rio Arriba County...The part about the global heroin trade wasn't anything I couldn't get from Wikipedia....Anyone one know where Joaquin is today?? I also didn't realize that Chimayo is one of "the most important Catholic pilgrimage center in the United States"....

The bibliography and research notes alone justifies the price of the book. The stories of one small town and of 20th Century Globalism are artfully interwoven. Altogether, it's inspiring in a painful, eye-opening sort of way. Contrary to "About the Author", Chellis Glendinning is a she, not a he.

Chiva paints a picture of Chimayó New Mexico, number one per-capita consumer of heroin in the number one per-capita consumer state in the United States. The book also offers a well-researched history of the global heroin trade from past to present. The picture is ugly indeed. For those advocating legalization (of hard drugs) as the remedy to this problem, I suggest reading this and then asking yourself: is this the kind of country I want to live in? And for those that think the current plan in the war on drugs is working, I have the same suggestion. Quite obviously it is not working and will not cure the problem. The author points out that at one time heroin was legally introduced to China. The result: over one quarter of the adult population became hopelessly addicted. In Chimayó, the supply was plentiful, with an individual dose costing $15, but anyhing not nailed down was likely to be stolen. Overdoses and shootings were common events. A friend of mine from a barrio full of tecatos in Juarez speaks of the same. Anywhere heroin has been introduced without control to a population, usage of the drug has increased exponentially. With disastrous consequences. The writing is good and kept me interested from start to finish. But I think the weakness of the book comes near the end where solutions to the problem are offered. There, you'll find more questions than answers. I highly recommend Chiva for anyone interested in the drug problem or the region described in the book.

Every now and then somebody comes along who acts as a bridge or emissary between two cultures. Not as a missionary out to "improve," "evolve," or Christianize the natives, or to sell them slicker TV sets; not to study them like infusoria under a microscope; not to turn their gods into meteorology; but to listen, deeply, into the patterns of their life and language, and then--strictly by invitation within that community--to create a thing of beauty that casts a circle of illumination over what had remained hidden in the shadows cast by the mainstream. In Chimayo, New Mexico, that emissary is Chellis Glendinning. At one time Chimayo ranked #1 in drug overdoses in a state (New Mexico) that also ranked first in this grim category. This book is a story--personal, cultural, wrenching, hard to read in places because disturbing in its detail--of how the Chicanos and Mexicanos of Chimayo went back to their cultural roots to push the dealers out of their town, then apply the wisdom of those roots to healing the victims of the dragon Chiva, "heroin." The use of "roots" is deliberate, because as the author makes clear, the drug problem is a product of a long tradition of colonial expansion and devastation in which a land-based people have been globalized, exploited, and thrust into poverty on soils their ancestors once cultivated and loved. From out of that soil came the remedies to combat sniffed, smoked, and injected poisons which users employ to forget for a moment that they are poor; that they have few options and scarce employment; that they are seen by the culture that has alienated them as aliens. Whence this black-market plague of Thebes? Nations in which the United States Government has intervened to make the world safer for its businessmen: Afghanistan, Columbia, the Asian Golden Triangle, where farmers made poor by either military activity or "free" trade (free for whom?) are forced to grow opiates for sale to Europe and, of course, the United States of the Fifties, where 20,000 users would soon swell into millions. Their supply? Substances sold by "freedom fighter" drug lords (remember Air America? Burma, now Myanmar? the Afghanistani Northern Alliance?) in the pay of the CIA--even while conservatives sold the sham of a righteous war on drugs. Just say no, except that "like a McDonald's hamburger, heroin can be had just about anywhere in the world." Chimayo said no and meant it, and although overdoses continue, the last part of this book could be used as a manual for how healing practices implemented locally--NOT from the top down or imposed from outside--successfully grapple on many levels (land, culture, faith, mentoring, and ceremony) with a scourge of the colonialism that continues today transnationally.