Join us for a reading with anthropologist Angela Garcia, author of The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, on the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. In conversation with Garcia is Sean Brotherton, Professor of Anthropology at New York University.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time. 

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Garcia is an anthropologist and a writer. Her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and PEN Center USA’s University of California Exceptional First Book Award. Garcia was born in New Mexico and now lives in San Francisco, California, with her two children.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Sean Brotherton is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is a cultural anthropologist who studies and theorizes health, medicine, the state, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis. Brotherton’s books include Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba and the forthcoming Global Health, Otherwise: Cuba and the Politics of Care. He is currently working on another project, Armed Against Unhappiness: Psychoanalytic Grammars in Buenos Aires, which examines how diverse psychoanalytic communities in Buenos Aires have produced distinctive grammars that influence how individuals articulate ideas about health and well-being.

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ACCESSIBILITY: Recirculation is a wheelchair-accessible space with one ramp from the street level down to the store. Most of the shelves are on wheels and can be moved to provide additional access. The bathrooms are not yet ADA compliant and do not yet have a changing table but are gender neutral. The events are mic’d for sound and videos are captioned when possible. Free ASL interpretation is available for most programs upon request. Please email events@wordupbooks.com to request interpretation as early as possible. If you have specific questions about the space or how an event can be made more accessible to you, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@wordupbooks.com.