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As school germs return, rest easy. Clorox has got your back to school. Ugh, your back? It is I, your kids, Jeremy Desk, and I've got things to say. I've been sneezed on, used as a tissue, there's chewed-up gum under my... Calm down. I'll get my Clorox disinfecting wipes. Oh, and can you please get these sweaty gym clothes off of me? Ugh, ugh. School, am I right? Clorox disinfecting wipes kill 99.9% of viruses and bacteria and clean hundreds of messes on hard non-porous surfaces when used as directed. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the New Books Network. This is New Books and Medicine, and I'm Claire Clark. Today, I am talking to Angela Garcia, who is an anthropologist and a writer, and we are talking about her exciting new book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost, Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico Cities and Exos, which was just published by Ferrar Strauss and Giro. And Angela is joining us from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, and we are so excited to welcome her to the show today. Angela, welcome. Thank you very much. I wonder if you could begin our interview by telling us a little bit about your career. Wonderful. Well, I am an anthropologist, and it's not something I imagined myself becoming when I was younger. I was actually very interested in literature, architecture, you know, at a wide range interest in the humanities, and upon taking a course in anthropology, when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, majoring in comparative literature and architecture, I was just blown away by the course, and it felt like I had finally found a home that would provide a space for me both to, you know, engage with the world, research people's lives deeply, but also an opportunity to be able to write about them, and a genre that really spoke to me in that being ethnography, which is a combination of both, you know, the research itself, but also a more can be, at least, literary mode of writing, which was always something that I did. I've been writing really since I was a teenager, and so I really just loved the space where, you know, very rigorous social science research met with kind of deep commitment to the humanities, and the class just really opened my eyes to a whole new realm of what study might look like, and I quickly changed my major, and, you know, pursuing anthropology throughout my graduate career, and then, of course, my professional life. Wonderful. Well, and so you found a disciplinary home? I did, and I, you know, a lot of people, at some point in their career, questioned whether they found the right home, and I know that I did, and it's, you know, I think a really exciting discipline that's gone through, you know, many twists and turns, and is now one that is really, you know, firmly rooted in the humanities, or at least the kind of anthropology that I practice. And when in my, during my graduate career, I focused specifically in the realm of medical anthropology, which is basically cultural anthropology, but with an emphasis on questions of health, and healing, and disease, and medical anthropology really became a space where I could address longstanding concerns that I had around questions of addiction, specifically. And so, so medical anthropology became my focus within cultural anthropology, and it's really what I, what I teach, and what I, you know, I think I'm most engaged with in, in my literature. I mean, excuse me, in my writing, and, and it's, I think it's one of the more exciting subfields in anthropology today, and it's certainly the one where I encourage a lot of my students to enter into, because frankly, that's where a lot of the academic jobs are, and it's getting harder and harder to come across, you know, a good 10-year track position and a lot of my students who are interested in questions of health, disease, social suffering, you know, I'm like, hey, there's this field in anthropology called medical anthropology, and it's worth sort of looking into, and in fact, a number of students end up going in that direction and doing very well. So as a professor, it's always really exciting to see my students take off, and there are a number of really exciting medical anthropologists to be coming up through the ranks, and many of them are my former students, and so it's really a wonderful space for folks to research and to teach, and to read and to think with. Well, this book is one of my favorite that I have read from the new books network so far, and so I wonder if we could turn to it, get into it a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to write the way that leads among the last, and this is the product of, you know, over a decade of ethnographic work and life experience, and I think one of the blurbs, you know, says it's a true, it's said something like, it's a true book in the sense that it could only have been written by you, which I felt like was a really accurate descriptor, and just, yeah, tell us about what brought you to this book. Well, you know, it's funny because I actually very much, you know, wanted to get away from the theme of drugs, and also the theme of addiction more broadly, and I went to Mexico City to study something very different, to study what was at the time going to be this mega project that was going to incorporate medicine, research, and living, and in Mexico City. And so I was interested in how this project, which was, you know, receiving a lot of international attention, was meant to sort of redefine Mexico as a hug for medical research and teaching. And there were a lot of grand plans for this place, and ultimately it never came to fruition. But the truth is I actually really went to Mexico City because of family issues. My partner at the time was from there. He wanted to return. We had just spent a number of years in rural New Mexico, where I was doing research on my first book, and I decided, "Okay, you know, enough with village life, let's go." He flew to a megalopolis, and started new life there with our kids. But I really had no intention of studying drugs and addiction. I wanted to study something that engaged with my longstanding interest in architecture and health, but I found myself as kind of always being pulled into the topic through, in this case, it's sort of a chance encounter with a taxi or with a driver who I sometimes hire to take me on my excursions. And when I was speaking to him about the project I was researching, he said to me, you know, the political red tape in Mexico, given the elections, given all of these things, what you're describing is never going to happen. But let me show you what does exist, because I had told him in the course of our getting to know each other over several months, and I had also studied addiction problems in northern New Mexico among Latinos. So he said, "Okay, addiction is a big issue here. Let me show you how addiction is treated." And he took me to an enexo and described the fact that his daughter was there. And at the time I didn't know what an enexo was, and over the course of really a decade, I slowly began to understand what these places which on the surface are these, you know, controversial, unregulated treatment centers for drug addiction and increasingly mental health issues. But then as I began researching them, I realized that they were more than that. And so I wanted to understand how drug treatment sort of intersected with broader issues in Mexican society. And right now, one of the most pressing issues is criminal violence, which is just unrelenting and intensifying. And so I watched these places proliferate over the decade that I was in Mexico City, and I really wanted to understand, you know, why are they proliferating to the degree that they are in particular areas of the city? And so really my question became not only one of what kind of drug treatment centers are these, but what are they serving the community beyond drug addiction itself? And that became really the focus, you know, how does drug addiction intersect with these other, you know, structural issues intersect with, you know, the life of a community, the life of our family, and really, you know, the goings on of a nation that's really under siege because of unrelenting both political and criminal violence. And I saw over time a relationship between enexals and these broader issues, and I wanted to use the enexal, the figure of the enexal to explore, not just addiction, not just recovery, but also what these drug treatment centers say about the larger world. And I found that they had a lot to say. Could you give us go into this background on enexals in a little bit more detail? Because our listeners really need to understand the kind of social and political and the context in which they operate as well as sort of what goes on inside them in order to understand what, you know, you you accomplish with the rest of the book. So someone coming to the maybe coming to your book or our conversation, cold knowing, nothing about Mexico City, nothing about addiction treatment, what would they need to know about enexals in order to be able to understand what you explore? Yeah, it's, you know, I mean, it took me so long to understand them that I'm, I'm hope that within the pages of my book, I'm able to capture their complexity. But, you know, I traced, you know, their, their lineage, how did they emerge? Why did they emerge and I began to sort of begin to understand that at various points in Mexican history during the 80s, during the 90s when there were these, you know, very deep financial crises, the working poor, the informal working poor, which makes up over half of Mexico's population who have very little access to professional treatment, had to create their own forms of treatment. And which is, which is not nothing new, you know, poor people have always devised their own way of caring for each other in the absence of professional care. And so I saw these spaces emerging from this history of mutual aid that was, that was sort of tangentially related to 12-step programs, to AAAMO in particular. And, and these are spaces that are often located, these treatment centers and next source literally means annex in Spanish. And so there are annexes that are generally tied to other larger spaces. And in Mexico City and the neighborhoods where I worked and they're often located within large tenement apartments where many, many families live. And there are these spaces where often troubled youth, it used to be, you know, troubled, you know, older men who had alcohol and drum, you know, alcohol problems primarily would go and they would stay, you know, for weeks or months. Over time in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a shift in the population that was being treated in an exos and it became younger and younger men and women addicted to drugs and not to alcohol. And, and I wanted to understand, you know, how did the shift mirror changes in the country as a whole? And what I began to understand was, you know, A, drugs were becoming much more prominent in Mexico, you know, alcoholism was always kind of the problem of addiction in Mexico and Mexico never saw itself as a drug, a drug using country. It was always the country where drugs passed through on their way to the United States. But of course, many of those drugs find themselves in the hands of people in Mexico. And so there were expanding local drug markets with that and it growth in addiction problems and so much of this was happening in low income urban neighborhoods. And so in a, you know, in response to this growing problem of addiction, these enex was began to proliferate in these broader living environments. And so I, I, I ran in thinking, okay, this is a response to it, the problem, the growing problem of drug addiction. And it is, but the more I spent, spent time in an exos, I realized, you know, there are a lot of people in here who are, who's tell me they don't have a problem with drugs. They tell me that there are people outside there who want to hurt them, whether that's a gang member or a police officer or even a family member. And so they began to, people began to use enexos as a kind of refuge as well. And so I was interested in, well, the this space which in and of itself is a very troubling space that engages with violence as a therapeutic modality, how does this kind of space, which is so controversial, become a space of care and of refuge and of safety. And so that those tensions really became the focus of the book. I should say about enexos, there are no health professionals in them. Everyone who is in them who runs them is someone who has had addiction problems at one point or at least the people that run them, right, identify themselves of having had addiction problems. And they become sort of lay care providers and the people that are in them, oftentimes have never seen a doctor, they've never gone, you know, other than for vaccines as a baby, they've never been to a doctor. And so enexos became a kind of catch all for a lot of different health problems, most of which are related to addiction and mental illness. So you have untrained, at least in terms of professional training, untrained people caring for others who often lack a lot of information about what it would be like to be treated by a professional caretaker, they just don't know. And so this is their interfacing with the medical community. The enexo is the medical community. It is the local care clinic. But it's one that is coercive. It's one that is what most people would consider abusive. And yet it is also a space of care where what we might call patients known there as enexados, those who are in enexos, may be for weeks to months to years, they really can't determine for themselves when they get out, they get out when they're either kicked out or their families decide, okay, it's time to come home. But once you're in there, you're kind of stuck until somehow you get out of there. And so I wondered, you know, well, what kind of care space is this, given this use of coercion and that kind of, I think the tension and the contradiction between care and violence as that played out in the enexo became the focus of the book. This is the moment. The Bachelorette is back and the power I'm gonna fall in love is in Jen's hands. I'm gonna do it my way A.B.C. tonight. Everything about her is great. I feel so special. Jazz look like a puppy. My men are very, very hot. I'm gonna call 911 because you are looking so fire. 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And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you came to think of yourself as a writer, even though obviously you were an award-winning ethnographic writer before. Yay! You came to think of yourself that way through your work on this book. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I went to Mexico City to get away from the theme of drug addiction, which is something that I explored in my first book in my own sort of culture. I was looking at Latinos and heroin addiction. And when I went to Mexico City, and that was a very difficult project because that hit very close to home as well, I come from a family that has very serious addiction problems. And I wanted to understand them in my first book. When I went, you know, to Mexico City, I sort of again had no intention of studying drugs and addiction. I wanted to get away from that because it was so taxing emotionally and sort of psychologically. But I sound that I couldn't get away from to the theme, it kind of followed me. And but the first book I was, I kind of kept the personal connection to themes of addiction under the radar a little bit. But in this book, I decided, you know what, my life experience, having grown up in a family that struggles with addiction problems, really is the force for my research. But it was also really the force for my writing. And I decided that in this book, I was going to put aside the dictates of what academic writing should look like and include some aspect of memoir, in part because, you know, my own personal life very much shapes the kinds of things I think about in research, but also because I began recognizing myself in a lot of the enexables who I studied. I saw myself as a struggling teenager, you know, marginally housed, poor relationships with family, experimenting with drugs myself. I saw myself in some of the young people that I came to research. And I decided, you know, and throughout the very long period of research, I was going through a lot of life transitions myself with my own family. And I realized I couldn't and didn't want to try to tease those apart. I saw the two narratives, the narrative of my life, of my teenage years really intersecting with what it was that I was seeing in my research and how I came to understand what I was seeing. So in this sense, I really believe that anthropology is highly subjective, you know, considers itself a social science, and I believe that it is. But I also believe that there is space for subjective experience to be woven into, you know, our research. And in this particular case, I decided to make it very explicit. And in part because you're right, you know, the arc of the book is ten years, and during those ten years much in my life has changed, and the way that I understand enexos has changed, and I decided to just weave those two narratives together throughout the book. And which makes it, I guess, a little bit difficult to place, like, is this an ethnography? Is this an academic book or is this a memoir? And that was always a conversation that I had with my publisher. And we decided, you know, ultimately let's just be really clear and make it both, you know, but it's still been, you know, it's kind of a bit of an unusual structure for something that it would also be considered academic. Well, it, you know, reeds together your life story with, you know, over a decade of anthropological fieldwork, and it also includes, it doesn't have footnotes, but it includes a section on recommended of recommended reading, and it is so deeply personal and so deeply researched. And, you know, as somebody who sort of, you know, identifies as being committed to the health humanities or the humanities and medicine, it engages, you know, with classic literature, it engages with art, if you were to assign this book in a class, what might you assign to a, what type of class would it be? And then what might you assign to a company at? Well, that's a really great question, and it remains to be seen. What sort of term is book will be assigned? You know, I hope it is, certainly in anthropology courses, I think it has a lot to say about not only the story of an exos themselves, but how do you do anthropology? You know, and a lot of how we do anthropology has a lot to do with our own personal lives. You know, we bring our lives to the field with us, and so I wanted to make that explicit. So I think this is a deeply scholarly book, and I want it to be read as a work of scholarship, but I also wanted, again, to make explicit how our personal trajectories really shape our scholarship, at least for some people, and for many anthropologists, that is the case. So I definitely hope it's adopted in anthropology courses. I'm hoping my friends and different universities will help me in that regard. I also really hope that people who work in medicine, whether they're working in addiction medicine or medicine for the working poor, that they also read the book, because I think it has a lot to say about what care can look like, how to recognize it, what are the limitations of biomedicine, what are the possibilities that exist in community health? I feel like we take these spaces, which are illegal and often criminalized, and think of them as spaces of potential healing, and what might need to be done to kind of build on that. But I also want people who are, you know, move people that read literary non-fiction to read the book. And a lot of the people that blurbed the book, you know, they're not scholars in the traditional sense. They're writers. They're memoirists. And they were the ones, you know, one person is sort of a medical anthropologist who blurbed it, but primarily it was writers. And they were really commenting on the writerly, the literary aspects of the book, which I hope are seen as helping to carry the kind of scholarly message. So I don't see the literary aspect as being necessarily separate from the scholarly, you know, work. I see the literary aspect as being integral to it. And the way that I'm able to communicate the implications of the book through a form of writing that I hope will reach a broader audience. Academic writing is often notoriously difficult to read, and it can be very difficult to get into the hands of non-academics. And I was really committed with this book, like my first book, to get into the hands of people who are non-academics as well, but who appear deeply about the issues that I write about and who can relate to them. And so, you know, one of the most gratifying things that has happened since the book came out a couple of weeks ago or months ago is receiving emails from people who have said, you know, this is capturing my experience, or, you know, this moved me. This has gotten me to think differently about violence in Mexico, or has helped me think differently about immigration politics. And the other thing that I really want people to get from it is that the places that I describe in Mexico are often places that exist in the United States, and, you know, what we would call hidden populations of undocumented immigrants. And so I really am hoping that people will also leave this and come to understand how it reflects some of the debates in immigration, you know, today, and which I think is really relevant to the political moment that we're in right now with the upcoming election. So there was also that aspect of sort of this is political commentary, and I want people to read it as political commentary. So it's trying to do a lot of things, maybe to do too many things, but my hope was that my writing, the way that I write, could bring all of these different themes together in a way that is engaging, and even at times hopefully moving, and even perhaps sometimes beautiful or touching, which wasn't a specific goal, but I think after I wrote it and my editors were reading it with me and kind of working with me, you know, I remember one of my editors saying, you know, at one moment in the book, I began to cry. And I thought, okay, that's good. I want people to be moved to tears, you know, because when I was writing it, there were times when I was moved to tears and had to sort of stop and catch my breath, because it was a very difficult and oftentimes emotional book to write. So you know, when I think a lot of academic books are seeking for a crossover audience, because we want to be read beyond our small sort of cache of academics, you know, we have a lot to say, a lot to offer to the world. And there was a point in anthropology where anthropologists were public intellectuals. They were out there thinking about Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, these seminal figures in American anthropology. They were out in the world talking about contemporary issues. And they're really kind of when I think about who are some of my heroes, some of these earlier anthropologists who spoke out about racism and sexism, and they were in the public. And it's not that I have a desire to personally to be in the public, but I hope that the book finds a readership that is beyond, you know, a scholarly one. Well, I think, and this is just, you know, one person's point of view. And I am an academic, so I can't speak to non-academics, but I didn't have to read this for work. I've read it on vacation. I couldn't put it down. So to our listeners, I, you know, I think it carries the message. I want to talk a little bit more about this question of audience. There is this really brief passage in the book where you talk about presenting your research on an exos at Harvard Medical School. And as someone, I teach health profession students and aspiring health profession students. And you get a question that I think is really confident in these types of modding in this, which is, do an exos work, you know, so you present, you know, it's nuanced and it's complicated and there's violence and there's care, and then, and it's, okay, do it, but do they work? And so I wondered if you could, you know, say two things first, what your response to this question was. And then second, what do you think the book has to offer readers and the health professions who may be are used to asking questions like that? Yeah, that is the question. That is the million dollar question that I, when I'm speaking to, you know, clinicians or psychiatrists, which I do, you know, frequently. And the question doesn't work always has scared me because I always know I'm going to get it. And I don't honestly know 100%, there's no, but what I, but there's no guarantee really if anything works, you know, the no, you know, with any kind of, I think, medical treatment, you know, may work for a little while, but we don't know if it will work forever. You know, and in this case, I understood the question as being, you know, just to keep people off of drugs. And the answer to that question is yes for a period when people are stuck in these places. You know, there aren't drugs and there isn't alcohol. There is cigarettes, but I never saw anything beyond that. So in that sense, yes, people cannot use. But what the person asking me really meant was how does this help women? Because one of the main through lines of the book is a woman, a mother who I follow really from beginning to end who sends her child to an anaxo with, you know, and is fully ambivalent about it knows that her husband, her child is going to get physically hurt because of the way that anaxo's work. But she still thinks it's worth it. And she thinks it's worth it not just because she has hopes for the health of her son and his extended life. She wants him to get off drugs. She wants him to be protected from gangs. But it also her being there relieved her of the kind of daily stressors that caring for someone with addiction problems, you know, places on people, especially women, especially mothers. So I realized that that's what this woman who asked me the question really meant. How does it work for women? And in that sense, I really do see anaxos as in some ways working. They protect women from the violence that they often confront when they're dealing with, you know, an abusive husband or child or, you know, and so in that sense, these places provide women with a little bit of a sense of security. But at also, but at a cost to them, both financially and even emotionally. So in this particular chapter, when I described this, seeing at the medical school, I describe it as a, you know, this question is existing in a kind of a gray zone. You know, on the one hand, we can see them working. On the other hand, we can see the dangers and the toll that they take on people. So they occupy this kind of gray zone. So I cannot like a lot of maybe medical professionals or even social scientists say with full confidence that they quote work, but they do do a lot of work. And it's that was what I was really focused on, you know, not do they keep people sober. But what do they do and what do they say about the world in which they exist? And so in that sense, I think they really work. I think they really work in helping to reflect, you know, the contemporary issues that face not just Mexico, but a lot of issues that face people in this country, how do you care for people in the absence of professional care? And in that sense, they do work because they do provide that, but also at a kind of a cost. And it was that that tension that really matters to me. And I felt like in the question, I had to answer really honestly. And so basically I said, yes, sometimes, sometimes they work, but but but I can't guarantee you. I can't provide any guarantees. And I can't even always say exactly how they work. But I do know that for some people, they absolutely do work. For some people, people stay off drugs, they go home, then they begin overtime to develop their own annexos. They have their own space of what they would call recovery. But again, these spaces are really complex in that they draw on forms of violence to quote unquote help people to keep them off drugs, to help them. I think the biggest danger for me that I see about annexos is that more and more people with mental illness are entering them. And mental illness is on the rise in Mexico because of the escalating criminal violence that has been going on now for decades. And so there are people with severe PTSD, severe anxiety, people with schizophrenia, often also going into these places because there is no other alternative health options. And I worry about the people that are there who have severe mental illness because I think these places can actually, you know, could actually exacerbate that given that they're very small. You have a lot of people living in them. It's one room. So they're pretty dim places. And so I worried a lot about people who had problems with mental health, but I also knew that their parents and sometimes their spouses would say, well, we have no other options. And we think that these, you know, yes, there are risks, but we are willing to take those risks because we want to keep our loved ones out of the hands of the police or out of the hands of the public psychiatry hospitals, which are notoriously abusive and just in really poor condition. So people were, you know, taking often, you know, get their young kids who had problems with anxiety and your PTSD and putting them in these spaces and hope that they would also help with those conditions and not just with addiction, although, as we know, those are often co-occurring disorders. So, you know, they just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of different things that these spaces address. And sometimes they do a really great job. And sometimes I think they make problems worse. But I also know that to be true of the medical establishment that we have here in this country, you know, sometimes we get a real risk. A really great care and sometimes our care isn't good and can actually make our conditions worse. And the same thing is happening there on a very lay level. And so I wanted to really think about that. And so I think that there's a lot, even though they might, these places might seem very foreign initially. I think that they do say a lot about the way that we care about each other and what the limits we have. You know, what are our limits of what we can do and at what point do we take a loved one who is troubled, who is addicted, who needs a kind of support that we cannot give? What do we do with them? You know, and I live in San Francisco where there's incredible problems with addiction and with homelessness. And I know a lot of those people on the street come from families that were overwhelmed, that couldn't handle it. And in the next, we're talking about the same kind of families, but rather than letting their loved ones go or not being able to kind of keep them, they'll put them in one of these places and they'll know where they are and they'll pay a little bit every month to keep them there. They know their clothes get fed. And that is enough of a sense of providing a sense of security much more so than just sort of letting their relative go potentially to the street or potentially to a, you know, a public mental hospital, which was just or prison, which just wasn't something that people were willing to risk. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You might say all kinds of stuff when things go wrong, but these are the words you really need to remember. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. They've got options to fit your unique insurance needs, meaning you can talk to your agent to choose the coverage you need, have coverage options to protect the things you value most. But I'll acclaim right on the State Farm mobile app and even reach a real person when you need to talk to someone. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This episode is brought to you by Heineken Silver. When you discover something you love, like a new podcast or beer, you have to tell everyone about it. So when you try new Heineken Silver, a world-class light bear with only 2.9 carbs and 95 calories, you'll want to tell the world how great it is. New Heineken Silver, the world-class light beer with all the taste, no bitter endings, available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at heineken.com/silver. Must be 21 plus to purchase. Enjoy Heineken responsibly. I want to make sure that I ask at least one question about some of, so you got access to not just one an exo, but several different anexos in Mexico City and two anexos here in the States as well. And there are so many stories of families and of people suffering, you know, that each of them could have been a book on their own. And before I ask the traditional question that we ask at the end of New Books Network interviews, I wondered if you could, if you could choose just maybe just one family whose story you tell in the book and tell us a little bit about that story and why you chose to, you know, what we can learn from it and why you chose to tell it the way you did. Well, gosh, I marked so many amazing people and families and one of the, I, and I'm very focused on mothers themselves because I see mothers is bearing the brunt of the labor, the very costly labor of taking care of either, you know, relatives who have addiction problems or have issues with mental health. And the woman that really carries the book, her name is Autencia, he, you know, is a young mom with a teenage son who has a drug problem and she makes a really harrowing choice to have him sent to one of these places and it's not like a pretty scene, it's, you know, her son is literally kidnapped, which is something that she, you know, arranged and this is how you are taken to when we make stories, you know, you're not dropped off, you're kidnapped and you're thrown into them in this very violent way. And she is ethically very conflicted about her decision to do this. And so she, she, I follow her throughout the entire book and go through, you know, her own life story, how it is that she got to where she was and how then did her son, you know, come to be. And I follow her and I was unable to access her son, but there were a lot of other, you know, people that I, that were in in Exodus that I got to understand, you got to know and through them got to know their families. And so just for one other example, there's a young woman named Ceci who comes into an annexo, also in a very violent way. And I came to learn from her mother that, you know, we put her in there because they were being extorted by a criminal gang. They couldn't play the extortion fee. And in retaliation, her daughter was brutally beaten and sent, and her parents in response to this sent her to an annexo. And so I wanted to understand her story and what it was that her family did and why they did it and came to learn that they did it as a response to the, you know, escalating criminal violence in their own neighborhood. In Orpensia's case, you know, she did it because she could no longer bear the burden of caring for her, for her son, but she would not, you know, let him go. And, and so she, you know, did the only thing that she felt she could do, which was work even more, pay an annexo of fee and make sure he was in there, safe and away from the dangers that existed beyond the amoxic. Again, even though she knew he might be abused, he might not be eating enough. He might be running into trouble with other people that are in there, but that was still enough for her to feel that he was better off than being out on the street. And, and, but I was really focused, in this case, less on the experience of the son and more on the experience of the mother and, and, and many of the chapters, the mother is sort of the primary figure because I see them there in some ways they're the ones that are fueling an annexos because they're the ones that are turning to them for help. And so I think their stories are incredibly important and I wanted to capture those as well. And so, Hortensia, in a way, you know, it's, it's not an exaggeration to say, you know, we became friends and she became someone that I, I felt her life was really rich and really important and so she becomes a focal point and, and she taught me a lot about annexos without even her having never really stepped into one, but she was able to tell me, well, this is how they are understood and perceived by the sort of larger community of mothers. And this is why we need them. And, and that was a really important story for me to get across because these are places that are condemned on that are shut down violently by the police, but they're also the places that women need to keep their kids safe, but also sometimes to keep themselves safe. Well, we could talk for another hour about what this book has to say about mothering, but this is that we've, we've come to the end of our time, Angela. And so I, I'm going to ask you our traditional final question here at the new books network, which is what are you working on next? Well, there's an element of the book where I describe my own life living in a hospital when I was a teenager. And so, you know, it's a very small element of the book, but I describe being a kind of teenager that's really marginally housed. And so I'm writing a book about that space, about that, you know, hostile and about the kind of lives that, that dwelled in there and the kind of relationships that we were able to develop that were often very fleeting, but that were nevertheless supporting and oftentimes, you know, ties of friendship. But again, the nature of our lives, we were all in this very kind of vulnerable space. Often our relationships to each other were very brief, but they were very grounding and very meaningful. So I'm trying to write a story about friendship and family and the alternative kinds of modes that that may take. And the space of the gospel is in some ways like the space of the anexo and that it's this enclosed environment that holds many different lives. And so I'm writing about those lives and it's more explicitly a memoir, which is something I wanted to do for a long time and I'm at a point in my career where I feel like, okay, I'm going to do it. I'm just going to be real. I'm just going to do it. And so that's what the next book will be. Well wonderful. Well, I can't wait to read it to our listeners at New Books and Medicine. We've been talking to Angela Garcia. Her new book is The Way That Leads Among the Lost, Life, Death and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos, Angela, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. a lot of you. a lot of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (gentle music)
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: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (FSG, 2024) 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.
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