Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance

by Gary Paul Nabhan

Overview

New in paper, James Beard Award winning Nabhan (Agave Spirits) creative revolutionaries from the southwest border who change American culture in countless positive ways. A celebration of the artists, activists, and writers who are not Anglo-centric.

A century ago, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain profiled Anglo, French, and Spanish conquistadors, tyrants, preachers, and thought leaders who first shaped American culture. Since then, waves of resistance and disruptive innovation have flooded into the rest of America from the arid, southwestern margins of the US-Mexico borderlands.

Now, in Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan—cultural ecologist, environmental historian, and lyric poet of the American Southwest—illuminates the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. Whether Indigenous, LatinX, priests, nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it is the resisters, performers, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins who are constantly reshaping America. They have, against all odds, recolored and recovered the future of North America through outrageous acts of resistance.

After reading the stories of Estevanico el Moro, Maria de Ágreda, Teresita de Cábora, Coyote Iguana, Woody Guthrie, Tim X. Hernandez, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Reyes Lopez Tijerana, Arturo Sandoval, Lalo Guerrero, John Fife, Danny and Luis Valdez, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, and many more, we can never think about America the same way again. In Nabhan’s magisterial, radical recounting, cross-cultural collaborations have changed the grain of American life to one that is many-colored, once again flourishing with fragrance, faith, and fecund ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826368966
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese American ecologist, agrarian activist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and bilingual essayist whose work focuses primarily on the arid binational Southwest. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and an Utne Reader’s annual visionary award, and he is the author of thirty-two books, beginning with The Desert Smells Like Rain. His most recent book is Agave Spirits. He resides in Patagonia, Arizona, and Desemboque del Sur, Sonora.

Table of Contents

Introduction
A Note (or Apology) About Changing Names, Dialects, and Local Idioms

Chapter One. Resistance: Indigenous Elders Walking the Line
Chapter Two. Metamorphosis: Mustafa al-Zemmouri and Cabeza de Vaca
Chapter Three. Volition: Maria de Ágreda, Jumanos Captain Tuerto, and Enrique Madrid
Chapter Four. Abyss: Francisco Garcés and Salvador Palma
Chapter Five. Indigenous Nationhood: Juan de Banderas and Padre Pedro Leyva
Chapter Six. Race: Coyote Iguana and Lola Casanova
Chapter Seven. Rebellion: Joaquín Murrieta Orozco and Alfredo Acosta Figueroa
Chapter Eight. Revolution: Teresita de Cábora and Lauro Aguirre
Chapter Nine. Dust: Woody Guthrie and Tim Z. Hernandez
Chapter Ten. Steinbeck and Ricketts: Broken Men Breaking Through
Chapter Eleven. Reies López Tijerina and Arturo Sandoval
Chapter Twelve. Boycott: César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Fred Ross
Chapter Thirteen. Huelga en General: Lalo Guerrero and Danny and Luis Valdez
Chapter Fourteen. Sanctuary: Jim Corbett, Ramón Dagoberto Quinones, and John Fife

Acknowledgments
Further Reading and Cited Literature

Editorial Reviews

From this gallery of visionaries, rogues, dissidents, authors, and naturalists, a new American mythos begins to emerge.

Thomas Hallock

Against the American Grain could not be more timely: it performs the complementary tasks of reminding us that the good fight is a lot less lonely when contemplated alongside the resistances of recent history, and that the true exception in the American identity lies in its running against the grain of all the -isms.

Rubén Martínez

With his lyrical biographies of mystics, activists, rabble-rousers, singers, trailblazers, and outlaws, Gary Paul Nabhan places the desert at the center of the ongoing struggle against colonialism, racism, and capitalism. He celebrates the spiritual and social gains of thinkers and dreamers who go ‘against the American grain.’

Catherine Keyser

From this gallery of visionaries, rogues, dissidents, authors, and naturalists, a new American mythos begins to emerge.”—Thomas Hallock, author of Happy Neighborhood: Essays and Poems

“Gary Paul Nabhan places the desert at the center of the ongoing struggle against colonialism, racism, and capitalism.”—Catherine Keyser, author of Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions

“Gary Paul Nabhan places the desert at the center of the ongoing struggle against colonialism, racism, and capitalism.”—Catherine Keyser, author of Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions

“Against the American Grain could not be more timely: it performs the complementary tasks of reminding us that the good fight is a lot less lonely when contemplated alongside the resistances of recent history, and that the true exception in the American identity lies in its running against the grain of all the -isms.”—Rubén Martínez, author of Desert America: A Journey through Our Most Divided Landscape

“Gary Nabhan has always been, and remains, one of the premier voices writing about the Southwest and Mexico border life. His nature work has been priceless. But what brings me to his newest masterpiece is the remarkable depth of his writing about my great aunt, the Saint of Cabora. He has tracked down fresh historical information on Teresa Urrea and her times. And his personal testimony of her mysterious presence in his own life—a spiritual visitation to heal boyhood wounds—is simply beautiful.”—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America

“In Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan crosses boundaries, cultures, and centuries to celebrate the legacies of changemakers in the Southwestern borderlands, bringing their stories of defiance in from the margins of society and history.”—Curt Meine, author of The Driftless Reader

From the Publisher