“Recovery is possible and it happens at any moment.” ~ Lupe Salazar
Lupe and I rocked together on a porch swing under a canopy of beautiful green trees in the crisp northern New Mexico monsoon weather as she shared with deep love and grace, her purpose, and the work of Barrios Unidos, a small non-profit organization, based in Chimayó. Her kind and gentle energy reminded me of my grandmother, strengthened by the grieving and healing that comes with loss. She embodied querencia, which is at the core of Barrios Unidos’ model.
Lupe began her journey toward building Barrios Unidos—an interdisciplinary, inter-generational and inter-cultural community investigating cultural and psychological issues related to addiction and cultural trauma in Española Valley—when her son became addicted to heroin. At the time there was so much shame around addiction in the community that no one spoke about it. Families suffered in silence, and slowly hardened to the frequent experience of loss. “The more I saw, the more my heart hurt”, she said, acknowledging that “addiction isn’t prejudiced” it takes down any ethnicity and any gender, and “doesn’t let go.” Lupe, said the deaths from overdoses in her community are leaving “gaping holes in families” and “until we start talking about it, we can’t heal it”.
Lupe is not talking about isolated treatment programs, when she talks about healing. She shared a beautiful image of her community as a tapestry, with threads unraveling that needed to be “re-stitched with love, patience, and time.” Her vision and work at Barrios Unidos is grounded in a sense of wholeness and belonging. She doesn’t minimize medical treatment as a means of recovery, but also sees addiction as a “soul sickness,” and seeks to offer wrap-around services by creating a space where people can “just be” without experiencing a sense of blame or shame. She is creating a place where peace can be cultivated, through a lens that sees the gaps in Western medical treatment, and aspires for transformation. Lupe sees beyond the individual when looking at addiction in her community. She understands that real transformation requires both an internal and a communal transformation. Those with addiction are not the only ones impacted by the pain of addiction, but children, parents, and grandparents as well. She knows this well, as a grandmother raising two young girls. According to her, 65 percent of grandparents in Rio Arriba County are raising their grandchildren.
Healing is needed more broadly for families and communities impacted by addiction and deeply within the individual spirits. Part of Barrios Unidos’s mission is to, “Bring together experts and mavericks from the sciences, the humanities, and the healing arts to explore the root causes of these crises, and to envision pathways of transformation to offer to our community.” In Lupe’s eyes, there is a need for curanderismo, traditional medicine and healing practices that went underground when “evidenced-based” practices became important to health care systems, and “severed the body from the spirit.” She continued with this poignant statement, “You can’t measure the soul or the energy of love, so it’s [often] discredited.” From her experience, sometimes individuals just need to be seen, heard, and loved, and that is exactly what she has designed Barrios Unidos to do in serving the communities of northern New Mexico
To learn more and support the work of Barrios Unidos, go to their website at: https://www.barriosunidoschimayo.org/home
– By Carli Romero