The way that leads among the lost: Life, death, and hope in Mexico City's anexos By AngelaGarcia, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2024. 272 pp.

Angela Garcia's The Way that Leads Among the Lost is an enthralling and sometimes heavy exploration of the practices and spaces of care that have emerged among marginalized Mexicans amid the multiple forms of violence they are exposed to, particularly in the context of the drug war. The book begins and ends with the case of Hortencia and Daniel, which in many ways condenses the stories and the arguments made in it. The opening vignette presents Hortencia as she is horrified to see how workers from an anexo (an addiction recovery center for teenagers) come to her house upon her request and take her teenage son by force, engaging in verbal and physical violence. When she becomes desperate and tries to stop them, they reply: “You want this to work, señora? You want him to live?” The scene begins to illustrate how violence is an inextricable part of the care provided at these informal sites located throughout Mexico's (and the United States's) working class (and Latinx) neighborhoods. While such violence might (and does) initially appear to be excessive and arbitrary, it is, surprisingly, meant to serve as protection and care for those subjected to a greater, more pervasive form of it. This is why one can find here not just young addicts and petty dealers, but people of almost all ages, brought together by their amplified vulnerability to such violence. As Garcia argues, it encompasses “[n]ot just murders and disappearances, but kidnappings, extortions, robberies. Exploitative labor, repression, impunity, scarcity, and displacements caused by fear. These violences did not just affect life; they constituted it” (84). This is especially the case, as Garcia explains, in the last two decades of drug warfare. Hortencia had Daniel committed to protect him not just from his own addiction or the exposure to violence that resulted from his selling of drugs, but also to protect and unburden herself from his own behavior and her maddening concern with his safety. Besides additional labor, Garcia shows how Hortencia pays for this arrangement with the feelings caused by wondering: “Would he come home physically and emotionally scarred? Would he resent her so much he'd never return?” before concluding, “There was nothing else I could do” (116). In this way, Hortencia articulates and confronts the fundamental tension that Garcia finds at the heart of anexos (and in myriad instances of the practice of care itself): “[v]iolence did not just strip away her ability to care for Daniel—it had become the way to care for him” (84). In the handful of anexos through which Garcia takes the reader, she explores the variegated ways in which such a tension materializes: anexos are cramped, minimally lit rooms, where anexados are often subjected to cruel and demeaning, and sometimes outright violent treatment, and always reduced to an everyday routine marked by aimlessness, boredom, and monotony. In exchange, they live and, as I will further discuss shortly, engage in intensely dialogical, painful, and intimate forms of collective life, which sometimes produce healing. Garcia's exploration of anexos situates them in a national community in which the ravaging of the drug war is filtered through a rigid class hierarchy and the differential exposure to violence it engenders. This is poignantly illustrated early on, in an unlikely conversation she had with Manuel, a driver she hired to take her around the city, who first introduced her to anexos. He did so by both sharing the story of his daughter's intermittent presence at an anexo and then driving Garcia to one, far from the parts of the city she knew. This chance interaction illuminated an entire dimension of life in Mexico City—both spatial and social—that was invisible to the author, as it is to the city's middle class and wealthy, when it isn't barely glimpsed through sensationalist and reductive journalistic representations. Garcia explores how anexos are shaped by these patterns of class relations and their historical unfolding. These have manifested not only in the accrued precarization of the lives and spaces of Mexico's working class, but also in the unexpected, and ambivalent, sites of hope and possibility that anexos have become. In so doing, this book's contributions include not only the first ethnographic work on these spaces and their paradoxical practices, but also on the forms in which drug war violence is differentially experienced, intimately felt, and collectively resisted among Mexicans. The book is apt for teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels, as it invites students to reflect on the dense social life of drug trafficking and consumption, its entanglements with marginality and violence, and the moral ambivalence of care. Perhaps the most important contribution of this work can be seen by attending to its form. As William Mazzarella argues, “One of the most remarkable things about the anthropological approach—participant observation—is the way it turns constitutive encounter into method, ambivalently both affirming and disavowing mimetic resonance” (2017, 21). Garcia's book is an admirable and unique exploration of this constitutive encounter, the powerful resonance it engenders, and the profoundly reflexive knowledge it produces. While she initially arrived in Mexico City to pursue questions that took her far away from her previous research on drug addiction and treatment, and the emotional toll they brought about, she was unable to resist her immediate captivation with anexos. At first, such resonance is explored in instances where it is sparked by particular people, gestures, or moments of her experience in anexos, which lead her to reminisce about her own childhood and youth. But as the book progresses, the reader comes to see the depth of this resonance through two realizations. The first is how, against her initial reservations, Garcia comes to see, and experience, precisely how anexos are spaces of protection and healing. This is done mostly through testimonios, or testimonies, in which anexados engage constantly and painstakingly before their peers by recounting the forms of violence they have been subjected to in their lives. Such intense expressions of vulnerability follow various methods across different anexos, but all testimonios have in common the mandate that others attend to them—that is, emotionally attune to them, identify each other through them, and share them. This, in turn, enables anexados to “access the ”truth of being-in-common,“ to use Jean-Luc Nancy's phrase [… :] both an articulation of community and a force of it. It is an ethical mode of coexistence that emerges through ongoing communication and sharing” (91). In her own experience of giving testimony in an anexo located in the United States—which, interestingly, takes writing as the preferred method—Garcia ends up fully collapsing the distance between her object of research and her embodied experience. In so doing, she leads the reader to the second realization, that the book itself is also a testimonio: an intimate account of her own past experience of the pain and fear of abandonment, and of the ways that they have shaped her adult life. Its profound introspective quality is enabled precisely by the fact that this account is simultaneously an instance and a reflection (both an analysis and a mirror) of the practices at the heart of anexos and their formidable—if always potentially self-defeating—capacity for healing.