About Angela
Angela Garcia is an anthropologist and author. Her most recent book, The Way That Leads Among The Lost: Life, Death and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, explores the hidden world of anexos: informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness that are spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reach into the United States. In what little coverage they receive, anexos are depicted as criminal hideouts run and inhabited by Mexico’s most marginalized populations. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, they offer something of a refuge from the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.
Her first book The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) explores intergenerational heroin use and overdose among Hispanos in northern New Mexico. The Pastoral Clinic received the prestigious Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the PEN Center USA’s University of California Exceptional First Book Award. The Pastoral Clinic received outstanding reviews in top anthropology journals, The Progressive Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and National Public Radio. It is one of the most widely taught contemporary books in anthropology.
Angela’s opinion pieces have been published by the Los Angeles Times and she has commented on addiction, social inequality and other cultural issues on National Public Radio’s Latino USA, Morning Edition, On Point, the State of the Re:Union, as well as several local NPR stations, The New York Times and New York Magazine.
Angela has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in leading academic journals and edited volumes. She has given keynote addresses, lectures, and grand rounds at universities around the world.
Angela received her PhD from Harvard University and is professor of anthropology at Stanford University, where she teaches courses on addiction, medicine, violence, and care, among other topics.
Prior to graduate school, Angela was an HIV/AIDS educator with Médicines Sans Frontièrs (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders and Project Inform. She worked as a medical writer and consulting researcher on injection drug use for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
A cellist and poet, Angela has performed in numerous art and music venues, including The Echo in Los Angeles; San Francisco Community Music Center, The Mission Cultural Center, Theatre Rhinoceros, and Luna Sea in San Francisco, as well as the literary festival Litquake.
She has also worked as a baker, waitress, hotel maid, shoe shiner, and record store clerk.
Angela was born in New Mexico and now lives in San Francisco.
