Customer Reviews

Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade

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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.

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.

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.

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 tracing of his life journey rings true of all trauma survivors; he is cynical and resigned, and at one point excuses his behavior and lack of healing by saying, "I'm just a drug addict." Having said the above, praising _Chiva_ and defending it from a detractor, I have to say it's not perfect and I wanted it to be. I wanted _Chiva_ to be perfect perhaps because there is no other book on this topic that describes the connections between north-central New Mexico, the international drug trade, and imperial practices like colonization.

Yet, at the risk of sounding like a writing tutor, regarding the broader picture of international drug routes, I'd like to say that I wanted a work of coherent research conveyed in finely-crafted sentences that left no loopholes for criticism. I'm used to absorbing and synthesizing a quantity of research in the form of literary theory, culture studies, and proactive psychotherapy (along the lines of Frattaroli and Covey), but I wish author Glendinning had made the research flow more coherently; a sentence here and there would have helped me to follow the often unwieldy information of how we, the USA, perpetrated drug use as we competed with the USSR for Cold War allies.

Further along the lines of the craft of writing is the use of sentence fragments. Like "Whatever." Like "The inclination." And, even though I can see that the author wanted a conversational style that could actually be read by her audience, people whose reading skills have been kept low (as an effect or affect of colonization), sentence fragments often mirror social fragmentation. The longer, linked sentences suggest social coherence. And, making clearer links between sentences in the sections of complex information would have been a service to her readers. Of course, a scholarly style of writing might have lost her audience, but, on the other hand, also regarding the craft of writing, the author had to adopt a style or voice that she could blend with the very intimate sections with Joaquin Cruz, the Chimayo Valley protagonist.

Okay, if you're still reading this review, there is a nice intertextuality between _Chiva_ and other work. Jimmy Santiago Baca's memoir _A Place to Stand_ is the story that "Joaquin Cruz" could have written if he'd sworn off his addiction to cynicism; Baca shows that to save your culture, you have to start by saving yourself, and to save yourself you have to believe in something even if it's the poetry of Wordsworth and Whitman--two men who, though of the colonizing nations, taught themselves to see. The author mentions Franz Fanon's, _The Wretched of the Earth_, but dozens of works documenting colonization and imperialism have been written since then. A good example of research on the topic of how the USA plays nations off against each other is the book, _Good Muslim, Bad Muslim_ by Mahmood Mamdani. John Nichols' novel, _The Magic Journey_ shows how local Hispanos were forced off their traditional barter system onto a cash and credit economy.

There is a huge task ahead for drug survivors and their families: not only must they save themselves and their culture, they must become teachers. They must teach Anglo-Americans--particularly tourists and real estate developers--about their culture, their land, their identity. Among nortenos--local Anglos and Native Hispano and Puebloan--I've had so many good teachers. What the "dominant culture" fears most is an educated norteno/Hispano. It seems to me, the horrible dilemma for native nortenos is still the same: How do you stop water from flowing uphill toward money? I guess you can't make water flow toward you if you are stoned. So, get sober and fight for what's yours. And Glendinning has a long chapter on what is being done in the Espanola and Chimayo area to heal people and retain their culture. Ah, what heroes she writes about!

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"....

One of those small gems of a book, with a sweeping vision for story and plot. Glendinning takes the local travails of a village (and a love affair with a junky) and ties it to the worldwide big business of dope (8 % of the global economy). Chiva is one of the street names for heroin, a Latino slang word, and is used particularly appropriately here, since the book surrounds and embraces Hispaño culture and the village of Chimayo, New Mexico.

Chellis is weakest when she gets into rants about the loss of 1700's farming practices and economies (does she really want to go back to medieval child mortality rates, rank illiteracy, and life expectancies of 40?) and globalization. Sure, no one pretends to like Walmart, but pretending that it's an evil perpetrated by outsiders on us is silly - each Chimayo resident that shops Walmart participates democratically in globalization. Glendinning also has a legitimate but confusing set of views on colonization and the negative impacts of cultural exploitation. She is, after all, a European-American living in a Hispaño farming community as a writer because she likes New Mexico better than her place of origin. It's hard not to be an exploiter when you move into the `hood, but don't actually have to actually be dirt poor, a farmer, and latino.

Her narrative about her lover and nearly married Joaquin rings true, even though she has to fictionalize this complex, flawed man. Evidently, though they shone together like the sun, he never could really explain himself to her - but at least the Joaquin she invented was a true metaphor for the village, and the book. Where she shines is in describing the culture, and in talking about the contradictions of politics, money, and drugs. Where she could legitimately rant about US / Euro policy, she is actually constrained and well researched. The narrative of the number of times our governments have supported the drug trade in order to take on some implacable political foe (Communism, Taliban, right wing or left wing dictatorships, Muslim governments or political movements ...) underscores our hypocrisy without beating us up with it. Surprisingly, Glendinning does not favor legalization of heroin, though the book sets the premise well - she believes we would pay the same money to the global pharmaceutical houses, and that is unacceptable to her.

Characterization: A
Dialogue: B
Plot: B
Use of Language: A
Research and Background: B
Political Balance and Reason: C-