The Ambivalent Archive

ANGELA GARCIA

Letter to Eugenia:

April 7, 2006

I am doing my best to keep my mind so it means a lot to know that you are doing ok. Everything is the same but I have blisters on my wrist. My skin hurts. I was upset at the c/o for not taking me to the infirmary. She ignores me everyday. I told her the yard had no shade and my skin was burning. I walked up to her and showed her my arms. She ignored me and looked the other way and I started yelling and waving my arms. I didn't hit her but my mind was saying STOP but I couldn't stop. She ignores me. I need my cream. Can you please let them know? PLEASE. She ziptied my hands behind my back. She made me sit in the yard even when everyone else was called inside. She separated me. I was afraid I would go to Level 5 because she threatened. I just had to sit in the sun like that for hours. Even though it was cold the sun burned.

I feel like I'm shouting and no one hears. It's hard to write because it hurts. I have to be honest with you. It bothers me my cellmate gets more visits from her family even though they live in Window Rock. I think that is further away. That's what she said but maybe she's just trying to get me. She's seems pretty nice though. She reminds me of Piñon because she is so short and round. Why don't you come? You can ask Laura to give you a ride. Her sister is in Level 3 and I heard from Brenda who is here too that she comes at least once a month.

You are in my prayers. Please keep me in your prayers. Please don't forget me. b.

This is an account of my encounter with a collection of letters written by three generations of female kin in New Mexico. It is a story about the pressures through which these letters emerged and the processes through which they were eventually shaped by me into an archive. I am not a historian and I am not specifically trained in archival methods, so I use the term archive with some reservation. Nevertheless, I call the collection of letters an archive and not, for example, an album or a scrapbook because I believe that the stories that inhabit it deserve to be taken seriously as historiography. I also want to underscore the materiality and meaning of the archive to illuminate writing as a site of intimacy and struggle, mourning and survival, both for the authors of the archived writing and for the anthropologist who engages it at a later moment.

This struggle is multisited. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida notes that the word archive stems from the Greek arkhe, the place where things begin and where power is exercised. The meaning of the word archive is traced to the house of citizens with the power to watch over and signify the documents therein. This definition is unsettling to me but instructive, for the archive that I discuss here is located, literally, within my home. Over the last four years, it has traveled with me from New Mexico to Los Angeles to Oakland, has moved from a garage to a bedroom closet to a cabinet in a home office. No matter where I am within my home I am aware of its presence. The archive watches over me as much as I watch over it.

It's hard to write because it hurts.

These are Bernadette's words, written while she was incarcerated for a drug-related offense. Intended as private correspondence to her mother, her words seek to maintain a connection to life under the shadow of loss and isolation. The letter was eventually given to me, a kind of message in the bottle seeking an afterlife. I can only make sense of why this occurred within the context of broader relations that have connected lives and texts across time.

Anthropology is a part of this story. More than a "discipline," it is involved in the process of creating the connections between life and text, opening them up to new cadences and horizons. I have released these connections into their own materialization, into this ethnography — another kind of archive. My ethnography affirms, rather than covers up, its own ambivalences, in order to hold open the possibility of a return, a response, through which the archive is woven.

Why don't you come?

I met Bernadette in 2004, shortly after I returned to northern New Mexico's Española Valley. I have roots in the valley and had lived there as a child. I returned as an adult to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on heroin addiction; the Española Valley suffers one of the highest rates of heroin addiction and heroin-induced death in the United States. Several of my relatives and schoolmates died of heroin overdose; still others struggle with the disease. Each week, I read the online version of the obituary section of the local paper, scouring names and photographs of the deceased, looking for old friends.

These deaths haunt me and have prompted me to return (again and again) to the Española Valley and to the question of immemorial loss and the recovery of loss. What has been at stake for me is engaging loss as a form of relationality, which moves one toward the anticipation of an unknown future. The archive of letters I discuss in this chapter is one site for the development and enunciation of this melancholic movement.

The Rhythm of Writing

In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau notes, "Writing speaks of the past only to inter it." The rhythm of writing is the rhythm of mourning, which transforms absence into an enduring presence. The losses tied to Bernadette's letter are tied to my own. The archive materializes Bernadette's loss and opens up a space for my return.

Please don't forget me.

In 2004, Bernadette was ordered to attend a drug recovery program in the Española Valley, where I worked as an ethnographer and clinical staff. I observed her monthlong stay during my work on the night shift and often attended to her basic needs, like providing her food or medications or dialing the telephone for her outgoing calls. We were close in age and got along easily — so well we...