Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade

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About Chiva: A Village Takes On The Global Heroin Trade

Product Description "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. Review "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 assi