Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war.
The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them—the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.
This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia's own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs—a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take.
Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The Way That Leads Among the Lost
Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 30, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781250332479
- File size: 249537 KB
- Duration: 08:39:52
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from April 8, 2024
Anthropologist Garcia (The Pastoral Clinic) presents a stunning portrait of Mexico City’s “anexos,” informal rehab-like institutions where drug addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill are committed, sheltered, cared for, and sometimes treated harshly by staff. Though Garcia had traveled to the city intending to study a “utopian” government-proposed healthcare complex, she changed her research focus when an offhand conversation with a taxi driver introduced her to the “countless little rooms” that serve the poor. Stunned to encounter such a large but secretive healthcare system, she quickly discerns that the anexos are deeply connected to Mexico City’s escalating enmeshment in the country’s ongoing drug war; families often use them to hide teen boys from gangs and keep teen girls with drug problems from becoming targets of violence. Spending days embedded inside the crowded single rooms that comprise most anexos (“What is this place? A prison? A shelter? A church?” she notes while in one), she transcribes residents’ evocative life stories. Startlingly, her journey eventually brings her to the U.S.; “anexos are everywhere,” she reveals before visiting one hidden in Oakland, Ca. Garcia’s narrative is fueled by an insatiable curiosity about the unique ethos of anexos, which sometimes seem to serve as spiritual retreats from a world gone haywire. It’s a luminous, immersive account of an unseen social safety net.
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