Washington City Paper: Contents for Sep. 17

A Shot in the Dark
They're dangerous, surprisingly expensive, and they don't always work. Yet for many Hispanic women, black-market injections are the contraceptive method of choice.

Cover Story

The names and some of the identifying details of the women who take or administer clandestine injections have been changed.

Nobody asks who she is or what she wants when Isabel Alvarez shows up on the stoop of a Cardozo apartment building on a stifling afternoon in July. Isabel, like many of the building's tenants, is Salvadoran, and her face is familiar. The people on the stoop know—or at least guess—that she is here because it's that time of the month: time to visit the woman. And so, without inquiring, one of them buzzes her inside.

Isabel is here to see Sylvia, a curandera, or healing woman, who traffics not in herbs but in an injectable pharmaceutical. Sylvia peddles the shots from an apartment on the building's first floor, a fact that's generally known to her neighbors if not to the world at large. Isabel, who has been visiting Sylvia at four-week intervals for nearly a year, heads straight for her door and knocks. Sometimes Sylvia is out, and Isabel must come back later the same day. Today, though, the door opens right away.

“Hola,” says Sylvia, seeing that it is Isabel.

“Hola,” Isabel replies.

The noise from the corridor subsides as the two make their way to the back bedroom of Sylvia's apartment. Sylvia asks Isabel how she is feeling; Isabel replies that she's feeling fine. According to Isabel—who later describes the scene at my request—Sylvia then removes a slim package from a cabinet on the wall. She opens the package and extracts a needle and syringe.... Continued

Issue of Sep. 17 - 23, 1993

News and Features

A Shot in the Dark
They're dangerous, surprisingly expensive, and they don't always work. Yet for many Hispanic women, black-market injections are the contraceptive method of choice.
Cover Story By Liza Mundy
America's Most Unwanted
Ron Kiczenski Wants to Get Busted, but His Plans Keep Going up in Smoke
The City By Alan Green
Head Shot
Eyal Doron Says WJLA Owes Him $7 Million for Putting His Face in the News
The City By David Plotz
Fan Mail
The Mail By Jean-Claude Van Damme
Dueling Agendas
The Mail By Benjamin Lindsay
Nonviolence Then and Now
The Mail By John F. Steinbruck
An Approving Testament
The Mail By Anne L. Thomas
Drink Tank
The Mail By Mark Gauvreau Judge
Homophobe, Heal Thyself
The Mail By Peter Fuchs
Lambda Retort
The Mail By Cathy Renna
Bible Stories
The Mail By Wayne Shaw
Carrie On
The Mail By Heusted McNeill
Clause and Effect
The Mail By The Rev. Alpha Estés Brown