The key theme that stood out to me from Garcia’s book was that of care. In the first chapter, care was palpable in Andrés’ question of whether Garcia wanted to “observe” or to “work.” Beyond being a great example of participant vs engaged ethnography, this question also spoke to care. Did the author want to help the addicts at Nuevo Día, or did she just want to study them? I appreciated that this point did not turn into a self-aggrandizing discussion of her work on the night shift, but instead remained rooted in positive consideration of the heroin users with whom she worked. On that note, I was struck by one of the final sections in chapter one, entitled “On Writing With Care.” It is in this section that the following line emerges: “Conversations, encounters, recollections, and incidents— between them, between us— form the heart of this book and make it move” (34-35). I think that we can all draw from this definition of the heart of ethnography as we continue moving forward in this class.
Keeping with the theme of caring, the interweaving of addiction, lifeways, and narratives of addictive cycles, was bared painfully in the discussion of Adela’s home treatment center. On showing Garcia the house, the movement between pointing to the room that her husband never remodeled, to the room her children were born, and to the room that her son died, Adela’s narration of her physical house spoke to the lifeway that heroin usage poses, as later discussed by Bernadette and Eugenia.
In terms of a question, I was left thinking about Garcia watching her drug-dealing neighbors from her attic window (especially in the context of the death of her young son). What are the limits to observation in terms of ethics? How do we write about pain and suffering in ways that are committed to recognizing the hardships that lead to certain unsavory practices? And, what would it mean to witness, but to exclude from the narrative? If Garcia observed from the attic but never wrote about it, what part of the narrative becomes changed?