The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos

A powerful journey into Mexico City’s and California’s anexos, 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 addiction and mental illness, that are spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reach into the United States. For many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer an alternative to 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 fieldwork in Mexico City, wrestles 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, 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.

About the Author

Angela Garcia is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and the PEN Center USA Exceptional First Book Award. She has worked as a baker, a hotel maid, a corset model, a dishwasher, a phone banker, a record store clerk, an HIV activist, and a waitress, among other jobs. Garcia was born in New Mexico and now lives in San Francisco, California, with her two children.