In “Labyrinth of Solitude,” the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz writes of his fellow Mexicans as a people so burdened by historical trauma that they are cursed to “carry about with them, in rags, a still-living past.”
For her new book, “The Way That Leads Among the Lost,” Angela Garcia, an anthropologist, spent years exploring some of those traumas, chronicling the testimonies of clients of Mexico City’s anexos, makeshift drug treatment centers that have quietly proliferated on the margins of Mexico’s — and the United States’ — failed war on drugs.
Anexos have garnered little attention from academics and journalists who work in the region. They are clandestine spaces — a small apartment tucked in a tenement, a dilapidated building next to an old church — often concealed within poor neighborhoods.
Reporting on anexos in various parts of the capital, Garcia befriended the padrinos who run them and spent countless hours listening to the stories of the men and women consigned to them — addicts, dealers, the mentally ill or otherwise afflicted. Garcia even briefly enters an anexo herself, in California, where she reckons with her troubled childhood and adolescence.
Her book offers a view of the war on drugs that differs from the familiar one featuring colorful narcos with gold-plated rifles being chased by damaged, mustachioed D.E.A. agents. The characters who populate Garcia’s pages reside on the periphery of urban life, and of the conflict itself.
Anexos are austere, often brutal places. Their clients — anexados — are sometimes beaten, routinely humiliated and typically forbidden from leaving, at least until their family members run out of money to fund their internment. Early on, we meet Hortencia, a single mother whose teenage son, Daniel, has become both a drug dealer and an addict. After paying a local anexo to admit him, Hortensia witnesses the group’s staff savagely abduct Daniel from their home. Her son is pushed, kicked, handcuffed and whisked away with a hood over his head.
Why would anyone send their loved ones to such a place?
The answer is that they have no choice. According to Garcia, citing health experts, some 90 percent of Mexico’s residential treatments for the poor take place in anexos, a staggering figure in a country of more than 125 million, where drugs are no longer merely trafficked to the United States but, increasingly, consumed at home.
Mexico is a nation of social entrepreneurs, a gift born of its government’s ineptitude. Citizens find their own ways to procure housing for the indigent, employment for the jobless and, in anexos, treatment for the addicted. Violence and lawlessness are components of this ingenuity, the vernacular of agency in the absence of governance.
According to Garcia, anexos began to crop up in Mexico in the late 1970s, as “offshoots” of unsanctioned Alcoholics Anonymous programs. As in the A.A. model, treatment relies on the practice of regular testimony — deeply personal confessions of drug abuse, past mistakes and personal tragedies. At one of the harsher anexos Garcia visits, the testimony is referred to as desagüe, or drain;anexados are made to stand and demean themselves for hours.
Garcia captures the almost religious fervor of these testimonies, at times with a reporter’s eye for detail and at times with an academic’s propensity for clouded, technical language. She witnesses the desagüe of a young man named Toño, conveying his counselors’ taunts, his self-abasement and, ultimately, his breaking down in tears. “The ongoing, cyclical nature of desagüe enables an intimate and evolving understanding of each other’s suffering and establishes embodied connections between anexados,” she writes. Or, in the more succinct words of Padrino Mike, who runs the anexo: “First, they got to know they are not alone.”
There are three books intertwined in “The Way That Leads Among the Lost”: a personal memoir, a narrative based on field reporting and a scholarly ethnography centered on how anexos foster an “articulation of community” and an “ethical mode of coexistence.”
As a feat of research, the book reflects a remarkable effort. Garcia burrows her way into a secret world where participants are forced to expose their true selves. In the process, she provides an unvarnished look at modern Mexico, and the nation’s urban dispossessed. But as a work of narrative nonfiction, the book struggles to draw us into the disparate anexo communities. The focus moves from person to person and place to place with such frequency that the reader feels unmoored and, at times, numb.
At one anexo, we meet Bobby, an 18-year-old addict; Luis, a 29-year-old schizophrenic; and Ángel, who, neither addict nor mental-health patient, is a mystery. Any of them could sustain an entire chapter, or entire narrative. Instead, a few pages later, we hear about Juan, who was abused by his father, and Esme, a teenage prostitute. The details of their lives are quickly glossed over, and, apart from Ángel, none appears in the book again.
Even those characters who do recur, like Hortencia, left me wanting to know more. We never meet her son — he declined to speak with Garcia — or visit the anexo where she has dispatched him. Hortencia remains a face carved in trauma, without any deeper insight to bring grace to her suffering.
If there is a main character, it is Garcia herself, who weaves the story of her childhood and adolescence through the book. She writes in moving and restrained ways about her abandonment at the hands of selfish parents and her struggles with depression. But unlike Garcia, the men and women who are her subjects face hellish futures, without the means to save themselves. The title of her book, which comes from Dante’s “Inferno,” suggests what they are up against.
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