THE LADY FROM CHIMAYO

Author Chellis Glendinning set out to alert the world to the global nature
of the heroin trade. She started in her own backyard.

A sprawling village, home to about 3,000 people, Chimayo is the spiritual
centre of the RA-o 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, RA-o Arriba, with the most drug
overdose deaths per capita in the US 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."

Glendinning was able to do this job because she has a history of life in
political movements. From an early age she was taken to civil rights demos.
Born in 1947, with antecedents in Europe, and brought up in Cleveland,
Ohio, she embraced the anti-Vietnam, anti-nuclear and feminist movements of
the 1960s, went to Berkeley, San Francisco, and, over the next 20 years in
the Bay Area, became involved in the natural foods, holistic medicine,
ecology, indigenous rights and no-global movements.

Her books reflect that experience; Waking Up in the Nuclear Age (1987)
focused on the psychological effects of the nuclear arms race around the
time she completed a degree in psychology in the mid-1980s. She moved on to
write When Technology Wounds (1990) -- "a study of people made sick from
exposure to dangerous technologies"; My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery
from Western Civilization (1994) -- "an overview of how modern society
emerged from the domestication process begun in the Neolithic and how
addiction is embedded in the resulting nature/human split"; and Off the Map
(1999, 2002) -- "about the friction edge between land-based cultures and
empire, with a sub-theme of the practice of child abuse within dominating
societies."

As a writer and thinker she has been influenced by Lewis Mumford, Paul
Shepard, Emiliano Zapata, A.A. Milne, Che Guevara, Susan Griffin,
Subcomandante Marcos, Samuel Hahnemann, Eduardo Galeano, Suzan Harjo,
Jeannette Armstrong, Michael Ruppert, Kirkpatrick Sale, E.F. Schumacher and
Frantz Fanon among many others. "I've been indelibly marked by all the
movements I've been part of," she says, while acknowledging the influence
of the Chicano culture of northern New Mexico.

"When I first moved to Chimayo, I asked a local farmer his take on the
state of the world. We were riding horses across the badlands at the time,
and he took enough of a moment to contemplate that a tumbleweed bounced by
in the wind. Then he answered, 'The down-to-earth people are finishing.'
People, I think, tend to get fired up to insist on change when our hearts
are touched with realization of the most basic insights and goals.

"My friend, the Chicano activist and poet Arnoldo Garcia, says that culture
is not adjunct to a political movement; it IS a political movement.
Storytelling, song, poetry -- these are the essential ways humans
communicate meaning. They are the ways we teach and learn -- and survive.
It is only since imperial systems have made society monstrous, fragmented,
and complex that sociological, economic, political, psychological, etc
language has become necessary to describe what's going on. We are
challenged as we protest and as we restore to be aware that we are creating
culture -- and to make sure the effort reflects the vision we wish now and
ultimately to inhabit."

So Chellis Glendinning gradually found herself writing about the New Mexico
community that she lived among. "This book is nothing if it is not for my
community," she says. "My hope is to reflect back to the people of northern
New Mexico a slice of history in order to encourage us to continue our
beating out the encroaching forces of narco-trafficantes, government, and
corporations through drug epidemics.

"I wish to hold up Chimayo and northern New Mexico as a model for other
communities who wish to stage an uprising against drug epidemics. Or
against any insidious penetrations. And I wish to alert us all to the
global nature of the heroin trade. I have come to believe that the
purveyors of illicit narcotics are as ambitious -- and ruthless -- in their
dream of world domination as are Wal-Mart, Citibank, or Exxon. Right now
the illicit drug business takes up a whopping eight percent of the global
economy. That's more than automotive, tourism, textiles, and legal
pharmaceuticals!"

In the face of this seemingly overwhelming giant, the people of Chimayo
adopted an adversarial stance, that of David versus Goliath, but the real
accomplishment has been their autonomous unity, which Glendinning is quick
to acknowledge. "I am awed by what a group of courageous folk were able to
accomplish -- from turning the tables on fear and terror, to beating the
dealers out of town, to inventing methods for drug recovery and launching
healthy venues for youth -- all in ways that spring from and enhance local
traditional culture. We have a long way to go -- and more battles to mount
as global corporations have discovered us -- but we've made a worthy launch.

"The model of Chimayo does not require that people come to New Mexico to
grasp what we are doing. It's reclamation in the face of colonization. At
heart it's anarchistic creativity and courage, followed by vision and
sustained effort to build a different kind of world from what's been
foisted upon us.

"If the humble down-home folks of Chimayo, New Mexico, can do what we did
- -- and what we continue to attempt -- why not anyone?"

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