Anthropology at UCLA. She received her PhD in Social  Anthropology at Harvard University in 2007. Her work examines gender,  mental illness and drug addiction among the rural poor.

Abstract : In biomedical and public health discourses, echronicity? has  emerged as the prevailing model to understanding drug addiction and  addictive experience. This approach is predicated on constructing and  responding to addictive experience in ways that underscore its  presumed lifelong nature. In this article, I examine heroin addiction  and heroin overdose in northern New Mexico's España Valley, and  explore how the logic of chronicity is dangerously reworked through  the Hispano ethos of endless suffering. Focusing on the narrative  Alma, a Hispana heroin addict that recently died of an overdose after  many previous overdoses, I evoke a sense of the physical, historical  and institutional refrains in which she felt herself caught. By tracing Alma's death back to these refrains, I describe the complex  of entanglements in which her addiction took form, and show how the  discourse of chronicity provided a structure for her suffering and  ultimately, I argue, her death.