Victor Garcia, anthropologist and director of the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute (MARTI), presented recent research at the American Anthropological Association’s 111th annual conference, held in San Francisco from November 14–18, 2012.
Garcia was the chair of the session “Studying Farmworkers and their Persistence: Long-Term Ethnography, New and Old Communities, and New Insights.” In this session, Garcia presented his paper, “The Origins and Transformation of Drug Use among Transnational Mexican Farmworkers in Pennsylvania and Guanajuato, Mexico.”
The paper addressed the factors that lead to drug use among transnational migrants both in Guanajuato, Mexico, and in the United States. Some of the factors included family history of drug use, the witnessing of drug use, and traumatic experiences crossing the United States-Mexico Border. The paper focused on how these influences were similar and different and how they affected each other. It also featured information on how transnational farmworkers’ drug use transforms according to their location.
Information for Garcia’s presentation was gathered through his five-year transnational ethnographic study on migrant farmworkers in parts of Guanajuato, Mexico, and southeastern Pennsylvania.
