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In the summer of 1969, a grainy newspaper photograph captured Joe Fernandez standing on a cracked road between the administrative hall and military barracks of a decommissioned radar base. The base was once staffed by personnel responsible for the coordination of U.S. air defense systems readied against threat of nuclear attack. Chosen for its proximity to the Manhattan Project, the site served Cold War priorities, intruding on a land grant community whose ties to the land spanned centuries. Behind Joe, a sun-bleached geodesic dome loomed, a hollow relic of vigilance and New Mexico’s role in the atomic age.
More than fifty years later, I sat with his daughter Evelyn in her South Valley kitchen as we unfolded the yellowed clipping that preserved that moment. Evelyn’s account helped me understand Joe’s vision for Quebrar, the community-based drug recovery center he would later help found at the radar base in the photograph. “He came home one day and asked us if we wanted to move up to the radar site, which was really weird because my dad usually didn’t ask us things like that,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Well, there’s a swimming pool there and the houses are really nice.’” Beneath that startling offer was a radical gesture: the occupation and transformation of a federal surveillance site into a sanctuary for local Chicanx people in recovery named Quebrar Colony. “I actually have a cousin,” Evelyn added, “My dad’s niece and her husband became addicted to heroin, and they stayed up there.” A space of collective refuge, Quebrar Colony reimagined recovery as a deepening in community, where healing required the presence of kin, not their absence.
I argue that Quebrar Colony functioned as an insurgent infrastructure: a community-built therapeutic space that repurposed the residue of militarism and state abandonment to recover both from addiction and the layered dispossessions that criminalized Chicano life in the borderlands. By reclaiming a Cold War radar base and reimagining the “Chicano addict” as a political agent, Quebrar pushed back against prison systems and narrow medical views about addiction.
Organizing Against Criminalization and Systemic Exclusion
Joe Fernandez, a first-generation Mexican American and educator, was drawn into organizing through personal encounters with systemic criminalization and drug-related loss. Both he and his brother were wrongfully targeted and incarcerated. Joe eventually established stability, but his brother’s incarceration initiated a prolonged struggle with heroin dependence that was exacerbated by the conditions of confinement.
In the two years before the site was acquired, Joe and the other Quebrar organizers built coalitions across Albuquerque, holding community meetings and working with movement leaders like Joaquin Lujan, a former Black Berets member. Joaquin recalled, “We were taking on all kinds of issues. The poverty in the barrios was sky high. And [we were] taking on the [issue of] health care. We started the first breakfast program and [also] dealt with police brutality.” These efforts informed Quebrar’s interventions in the local drug recovery landscape, which had previously been characterized by a privatized detox system primarily accessible to affluent white patients and a punitive legal apparatus that criminalized poor and racialized communities for drug use. Composed of Chicano activists, individuals with lived experience of addiction, and families impacted by incarceration and state violence, Quebrar responded to the racialized contradictions of drug policy in 1960s New Mexico by challenging the entrenched structural inequalities that shaped access to care and framed addiction.
Joaquin reflected, “The Quebrar folks sought us [the Black Berets] out and we got together. We were anti-drugs, they were trying to clean up. And we found unity amongst us because we all lived in the same communities. We were the community.” In many 1960s liberation movements, people who used drugs were often seen as “unfit” for political struggle and excluded from organizing spaces. But in the South Valley, the shared realities of police brutality, land dispossession, and poverty forged common ground. Joaquin recognized that the fight for freedom from addiction was inseparable from the broader struggle for racial justice and that both emerged from the same conditions of systemic violence.
A January 1969 narcotics raid exposed the tension between criminalization and the scarcity of accessible care. When 140 officers descended on Albuquerque’s South Valley, arresting twenty-eight young Chicano men, it highlighted how addiction in poor, Chicano communities was addressed as a criminal issue while wealthier populations received more supportive, therapeutic responses. The therapeutic care of private detox clinics was often out of reach for working-class Chicanos, many of whom were turned away and left vulnerable to overdose or incarceration.
Discussing the significance of the site’s acquisition with a reporter, Joe emphasized the growing number of overdose deaths in the community. Derived from the phrase “to cure, to break, in a manner of pure guts,” the name Quebrar (“to break” in Spanish) was proposed by a participant in one of Quebrar’s weekly planning meetings. Shortly after the meeting, that same participant was turned away from a private clinic when seeking a safe place to detox and died from an overdose. The name Quebrar came to represent the support this participant needed—support he was unable to access within the systems that ultimately failed to prevent his premature death.
Responding to Dispossessions
As Joe and other South Valley leaders observed, families were often forced to exchange ancestral land—once a source of wealth and sustenance—to pay for legal defense for their children caught in the carceral system. In doing so, families deepened their dispossession, trading land for freedom in a cycle of loss. Reflecting on this cycle in a 1969 Albuquerque Tribune interview, Joe emphasized that the issue extended beyond addiction: “There is a husband, a brother, a sister who were once land wealthy, who have had to sell it little by little to hire lawyers for their sons.” This isn’t just about heroin. It’s about the destruction of families, of land, of trust. Heroin, as Joe observed, was one piece of a larger cycle of dispossession and criminalization that regularly ensnared Chicano communities in the South Valley.
Quebrar Colony reimagined recovery as a collective and political act. The former surveillance site on which it rested became a therapeutic buffer, insulating against the harms of police brutality, incarceration, and familial rupture. As Joaquín reflected, “It isolated them from the street. It became a moment to try to heal,” reframing isolation not as abandonment but as protection. Journalist Deanne Stillman captured Quebrar’s therapeutic reconfiguration: “It is an island of no exit, surrounded by miles of desert void… nurtured by isolation, nurtured by methadone, and nurtured by hard-working staff, many of whom are ex-addicts.” Once a tactic of militarized control, isolation was reconfigured into an insurgent infrastructure where methadone, once a military analgesic, became a catalyst for reimagining the world otherwise.
Originally synthesized in 1930s Germany as a painkiller and later repurposed in the 1960s for heroin addiction, methadone remained under strict investigatory oversight when Quebrar adopted it, as federal agencies questioned its efficacy and safety. Quebrar’s methadone approach rejected punitive, top-down models like those in New York and reframed methadone use as a political act of reclamation and self-determined recovery. Methadone became a tool for reclaiming autonomy in the South Valley, fostering kinship, rebuilding community, and resisting carceral and biomedical control.
Quebrar’s Model of Recovering the “Chicano Addict”
By the late 1960s, addiction had begun to be framed as a public health crisis. Federal recognition was both partial and hard-won. The passage of the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act in 1966 enabled institutions like the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to fund experimental methadone programs in underserved areas. Quebrar joined this shift, using federal funds like Model Cities grants to formalize its operations through administrative infrastructure and institutional recognition within public health planning.
A 1973 monograph authored by Quebrar’s medical director Leonardo Garcia-Bunnel and several others, entitled The “Why” of Narcotic Addiction Among Mexican Americans, emplotted the Chicano addict and their recovery within a critical genealogy of Chicano resistance. Emerging from the State of the Art Editorial Seminar on the Vocational Rehabilitation of the Drug Abuser, the authors challenged the racialized and moralistic framings of addiction that dominated public discourse. They argued instead for a structural diagnosis of heroin use, writing: “The question should be rephrased: ‘Why do the dispossessed, the outcasts, the downtrodden, the exploited, shoot dope?’” This reframing refused to pathologize Chicanos, instead naming addiction as a symptom of colonialism and the collapse of subsistence economies. Taking up this critique, Quebrar foregrounded political reconstitution as central to recovery by weaving writing and pictures from Chicanx activists and abolitionist texts into the therapeutic experience. These materials were used in one-on-one counseling to help methadone participants reframe their experiences of addiction within broader histories of racialized dispossession. Recovery, then, was about reimagining a figure of the “Chicano addict” through collective care, abolitionist praxis, and infrastructural world-building.
Angela Garcia’s work on addiction in northern New Mexico shows how drug use can entangle, rather than destroy, kinship ties, reshaping care and obligation in the wake of historic dispossession. Similarly, Quebrar’s organizers saw addiction as rooted in fractured relational worlds. But unlike the clinical singularity and depoliticized enclosure of heroin detoxification in Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic, Quebrar offered medicalized management of heroin addiction rooted in an infrastructure of Chicano community autonomy and collective political agency. Rather than absorbing the abandonment wrought by ongoing colonialism and punitive drug policy, Quebrar redefined recovery on its own terms by reclaiming the Cold War radar base as a site of political and therapeutic possibility. As one participant in the Wednesday night meetings recalled, “For the first time in our lives we were talking about the untalkable.”
Conclusion
Quebrar shows how repurposed infrastructure can become a site of therapeutic insurgency, one that transforms the figure of the recovering addict into a political subject. Speaking from the grounds of a former Cold War radar base, Paul Garcia, Quebrar Colony’s first director, described the impossible bind faced by those navigating addiction and criminalization: “At that time we were tortured by law. If we did not secure the drug, we were punished by the disease; if we did secure it, we were punished by the police. There were two doors open to us, the door to jail and the door to the penitentiary. And so, it was the prison that became a revolving door for many of us.” His words marked a refusal of overlapping systems—the carceral state, the medical-industrial complex, the familial and social ruptures wrought by systemic poverty and racialized policing—that made the revolving doors of incarceration and detox seem inevitable. In place of these, Quebrar opened another door: one toward communal healing, political agency, and recovery as resistance.
Sanghamitra Das and Taylor Bell are the section contributing editors for the Society for Medical Anthropology.