The way that leads among the lost Life, death, and hope in Mexico City's anexos

In this astute and harrowing chronicle, anthropologist Garcia takes the reader into a world few have ever heard of, the anexos, mostly unregulated treatment centers, primarily in Mexico City, where people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, and other challenges are often sent. Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande (2010), revealed the chronic tragedy of drug addiction among immigrants along the U.S.-Mexican border. Here her approach is studied and intimate as she mixes memoir and academic rigor to enter the traumas of lives uprooted and too often shattered by addiction. Mexico's decades-long drug wars have devastated the nation's population, crushing lives on every social stratum. Garcia delves deeply into the crisis, following the lives of mothers who have had to resort to anexos simply to keep their children alive. Are anexos prisons or actual clinics? Are they making a difference? It depends on one's perspective. As Garcia writes, "They represent not just violence and despair, but also care and hope." Given ongoing arguments over immigration, drug use, and legalization, Garcia's outstanding book adds compassion and insight to this important social and political discussion.

Anthropologist Garcia (The Pastoral Clinic) presents a stunning portrait of Mexico City's "anexos," informal rehab-like institutions where drug addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill are committed, sheltered, cared for, and sometimes treated harshly by staff. Though Garcia had traveled to the city intending to study a "utopian" government-proposed healthcare complex, she changed her research focus when an offhand conversation with a taxi driver introduced her to the "countless little rooms" that serve the poor. Stunned to encounter such a large but secretive healthcare system, she quickly discerns that the anexos are deeply connected to Mexico City's escalating enmeshment in the country's ongoing drug war; families often use them to hide teen boys from gangs and keep teen girls with drug problems from becoming targets of violence. Spending days embedded inside the crowded single rooms that comprise most anexos ("What is this place? A prison? A shelter? A church?" she notes while in one), she transcribes residents' evocative life stories. Startlingly, her journey eventually brings her to the U.S.; "anexos are everywhere," she reveals before visiting one hidden in Oakland, Ca. Garcia's narrative is fueled by an insatiable curiosity about the unique ethos of anexos, which sometimes seem to serve as spiritual retreats from a world gone haywire. It's a luminous, immersive account of an unseen social safety net. (Apr.)

A Stanford anthropology professor examines the largely invisible world of Mexican community drug-rehabilitation centers known as anexos. Garcia, author of The Pastoral Clinic, stumbled upon the anexo system when a driver she hired in Mexico City took her to the facility that had treated his daughter. She quickly learned that these informal facilities were "refuges" for substance abusers. "I grew up in a family that suffered from addiction problems," she writes. "During my three years of research, several of the people I knew and cared for were incarcerated or had overdosed and died." The author discovered that while officials called anexos "garbage cans for trash," others saw them as spaces that could benefit the impoverished and protect them from the dangers of a violent society. Compelled to learn more about them, Garcia gained access to several facilities across Mexico City. Her first encounters with anexo leaders and the people they oversaw surfaced memories of her own youth, part of which she spent living with runaway teens. The author's connection to the largely invisible community self-help network to which anexos belonged only intensified as she continued her research and learned of the methods used to purge anexados of their addictions. Garcia also learned that staff members routinely administered beatings and insults, but dedicated workers provided important space for testimony, "a way of expressing and interpreting violence on different discursive levels." Set against the background of the ongoing drug war in Mexico, this probing book raises ethical questions about the use of violence as a rehabilitative tool. It also illuminates the role of the U.S. in perpetuating human suffering through military aid, illegally trafficked guns, and its insatiable hunger for drugs while immersing readers in Garcia's own struggle to overcome the demons of a painful past. An engaging and insightful book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.