This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting fieldwork in Mexico City, wrestles 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, 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.

Angela Garcia is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and the PEN Center USA Exceptional First Book Award. She has worked as a baker, a hotel maid, a corset model, a dishwasher, a phone banker, a record store clerk, an HIV activist, and a waitress, among other jobs. Garcia was born in New Mexico and now lives in San Francisco, California, with her two children.