Short abstract:

Drawing on archival and ethnographic data, I showcase the emergence of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) from Chicano activists who encounter its objects to capture new understandings of “harm reduction” and MMT in contexts of overlapping social justice movements in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

Long abstract:

This paper explores an alternative drug “recovery” experiment led by the grassroots organization Quebrar. Composed of a network of people who use drugs, recovered from drugs and community activists, from 1968-1972, Quebrar offered an alternative vision for healing and community despite the rise of the drug war and carceral imaginaries of both Hispanics and drugs. Members of Quebrar were heirs to a 1692 Spanish land grant that was partially seized in U.S. federal military expansion for the construction of a radar site. Quebrar recaptured and transformed the cold war site turning New Mexico’s nuclear infrastructure into a war on poverty. This disrupted a long-standing node in a network of intersecting industries that routinely consumed the lives of Indigenous, Chicanos, and Hispanos, including their land, lifeways and identities. I argue that these efforts—reclaiming land, military sites, and ecological space—can be characterized through a mode of decolonial action that act infrastructurally to circulate drug recovery epistemologies, relationalities, and possibilities for recovery in a historical moment yet with continuity for emerging recovery futures. Drawing on fieldwork in Albuquerque, interviews with activists, archival documents about Quebrar’s treatment design, community organizing, funding, and historical analysis of drug and development policies, I explore how Chicanos reconfigured an alternative recovery infrastructure in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands through MMT; reclamation of land; interruption of legal systems that criminalize the “Chicano addict”; and providing forms of education to engage Chicanos in the local histories of colonization and resistance.