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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Marie Arendt |
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THE WAY THAT LEADS AMONG THE LOST
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.
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 themthe 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 drugsa 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.
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.
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Book
Published 2024-04-30 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux |