Anti-Colonial Recoveries: Building an Alternative Infrastructure in New Mexico

This paper explores the emergence of Quebrar, a community-led drug recovery program, as a dynamic and evolving alternative infrastructure within New Mexico's complex historical, political, and social contexts. Established in 1968 by a coalition of activists, drug users, and individuals in recovery, Quebrar aimed to address the pervasive lack of support for drug addiction in a region marked by racial violence, land dispossession, and the criminalization of drug use. Through ethnographic research and archival sources, this paper explores the processes and strategies through which Quebrar transformed a decommissioned site into a drug recovery program. Quebrar's infrastructure serves as a "thing-in-motion" by resisting and reimagining colonial and carceral systems tied to addiction treatment. This exploration raises questions about how alternative infrastructures can evolve in response to histories of colonialism and what they offer for future reimaginings of care and justice. Finally, it considers how these themes intersect with the practice of research itself, asking how embodied knowledge can be incorporated into the research process.