Book Review: ‘The Way That Leads Among the Lost,’ by Angela Garcia

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.