All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Overview

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home—only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation's foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. The frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence until Elizondo Griest moved to the New York–Canada borderlands. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods, while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between and the people who live there. This edition features a new preface by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469659244
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2020
Edition description:	Paperback Edition, with a new preface by the author
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is author of the award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc and Mexican Enough and associate professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Visit her website at StephanieElizondoGriest.com.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A blazing, page-turning, groundbreaking, soul-illuminating book."—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Editorial Reviews

An exploration of the borderlands that deftly mixes memoir, groundbreaking sociology, deep reporting, and compelling writing. . . . Demonstrates unforgettably that national borders constitute much more than lines on a map."—Kirkus Reviews

Offers much more than just a very smart and companionable tour of the country's ragged edges. It offers a model for how a curious person, any person who is sufficiently interested, can begin to navigate the boundaries that compartmentalize our country, and ourselves, toward wholeness."—Brad Tyer, Texas Observer

Elizondo Griest glimpses the modern immigrant experience through the lives of people who live in more than one culture. . . . Wrestles with profound questions of identity and belonging in a constantly shifting and increasingly unstable world."—Publishers Weekly

Some books that you read affect you emotionally because you insert yourself into the story and partially absorb the plotline. Other books can change your destiny. . . . Such is the work combining all of the above by Stephanie Elizondo Griest in All the Agents and Saints."—Charles Kader, Indian Country News Media

From the Publisher

★ 2017-04-17
An exploration of the borderlands that deftly mixes memoir, groundbreaking sociology, deep reporting, and compelling writing.A child of the parched Texas-Mexico border, Elizondo Griest (Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, 2008, etc.) found herself teaching on a Mohawk Indian reservation that straddled the frigid New York state-Canadian border. At first, the author could not perceive any significant similarities between the two border experiences other than the deep roots of Catholicism. However, as the months passed, she began to realize the commonalities between borderlands shot through with poverty, cruelty by law enforcement agencies, language wars, environmental degradation, poor schools, ill health, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and extraordinarily high death tolls, including suicides. As Elizondo Griest documents the plight of border occupants, she struggles with defining herself within her mixed-race background. She has thought of herself as a mix of Tejana, Chicana, and Latina, but people outside her family usually viewed her as a gringa due to her unusually light skin and blue eyes. But as she began to understand, the borderland existence is the most defining factor of all. Portions of the author's findings as a reporter are graphic, especially as she chronicles her travels with law enforcement officers to retrieve rotting bodies of Mexicans who died trying to cross rugged territory in Texas or Arizona to establish a life in the U.S. Perhaps the most revelatory portions of the book are the sections about the already existing wall on stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, barriers predating the rise of Donald Trump. The chapters about the Mohawk struggles are quite likely to seem revelatory, too, given the dearth of national journalism coverage of that region. In this well-conceived book, the author demonstrates unforgettably that national borders constitute much more than lines on a map.

Kirkus Reviews