All the Agents and Saints

Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands 

University of North Carolina Press
July 2017
 
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. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, 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.
 

* Audio Book read by Frankie Corzo (Blackstone Audio, July 2017)
* Book of the Month, Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club, July 2018
* Finalist, 2018 International Latino Book Awards, Politics/Current Events
* Selected, 10 Buzzworthy Books From Memoirists & Essayists, Kirkus
* Selected, 2017 Summer Reading List, Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club
* Selected, Best Book of 2017, San Antonio Express News
* Selected, 10 Texas Books We Loved in 2017, Texas Observer
* Reviewed and/or featured in:
   The Moth MainStage, Live Storytelling, The Majestic Theatre, San Antonio
   C-Span Book TV panel about immigration, Brooklyn Book Festival
   C-Span Book TV panel about the borderlands, San Antonio Book Festival 
   BookWatch TV, WUNC-North Carolina
   WUNC/NPR-North Carolina, The State of Things with Frank Stasio
   SiriusXM “Tell Me Everything” with John Fugelsang  
   KERA, Dallas NPR, “Think” with Krys Boyd
   KTEP, “Words on a Wire” with Daniel Chacon
   Texas Public Radio, “Fronteras” with Norma Martinez
   North Country Public Radio with David Sommerstein
   Nuestra Palabra Radio with Tony Diaz
   New Books in Latino Studies, Podcast with David-James Gonzales
   Cronicas, Podcast from the South, with Maria DeGuzman and Claudia Milian
   Akwesasne TV
   Dallas Morning News-Book Review
   Dallas Morning News- 5 Fresh Looks at the Tejano/Mexicano Experience 
   Kirkus, Starred Review
   El Norte de Castilla/Salamanca, Spain, feature by Mercedes Gallego
   Indian Time, community paper of the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne
   Texas Public Radio – Review by Yvette Benavides
   Chapel Hill Magazine
   KKUP “Out of Our Minds” radio show with Rachelle Escamilla
   Texas Standard, KUT Austin
   Alcalde, May/June 2017
   New Moon Girls Magazine, Summer 2018

Elizondo-Griest travels fearlessly and openly, compelling us to face the realities of the leaking wound at the borders between the US, Mexico, and Canada.  We see their physical boundaries, their artistic reinventions, their scanner-eyed objectifying patrols, and their borderlands people, most of all. What makes these dispatches worthy are their humanity and brutal power.  A blazing, page-turning, groundbreaking, soul-illuminating book. 
–Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Stephanie Elizondo Griest complicates everything we think we know about immigration, migration and life on a border — where survival and legacy intersect with race, policy and the unearthly divine. Griest writes with such elegance and authenticity that she’ll make you understand how arbitrary borders meant to divide people, cultures, governments, and even ideas can sometimes be the very place we find each other. A luminous and urgent story.  
-Rachel Louise Snyder, author of Fugitive Denim and What We’ve Lost is Nothing 

All the Agents and Saints is a beautiful book that takes us into the world of contemporary borderlands in a way that both breaks the heart and heals it. Only a seasoned travel writer like Stephanie Elizondo Griest could succeed so wonderfully in turning a journey to both the northern and southern borders of the United States into a profound meditation on the meaning of home and homecoming in an age of unprecedented global displacement. A stunning book with an urgent message of peace for our times.
-Ruth Behar, author of Traveling Heavy

Stephanie Elizondo Griest takes the reader with her on an exploratory journey that examines the histories and lifestyles within the Borderlands. Her stories are colorful, descriptive, and it’s refreshing to see a writer mingle and indeed become engaged within our community as an independent third party.
-Chief Brian David, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne

Texas Observer, June 2017, by Brad Tyer
There’s an almost throwaway bit of scene-setting late in All the Agents and Saints, just a few pages from the book’s end, that explains a lot about its writer. A friend of a friend is throwing a pool party, Stephanie Elizondo Griest is told, and she’s welcome to tag along.“It will be interesting,” she’s promised.“Everything is interesting to me,” Elizondo Griest tells herself, and her readers, passingly, so she forgets the curious remark until she finds herself chatting awkwardly around a hot grill with a drug-dealing Mohawk Indian.

Everything is interesting to me. In another context, from another writer, that might read as braggadocious, but it’s framed so offhandedly that it’s clear Elizondo Griest isn’t laying claim to any particular profundity. It’s just a described fact, and like so much of All the Agents and Saints, it has the ring of observed and considered truth. The result of that polymathic interest is an extraordinary book, and one that anyone with even a glancing interest in the United States’ borderlands should be eager to read.

Elizondo Griest is a native of Corpus Christi, and her peripatetic curiosity is well established in her previous books, including Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; 100 Places Every Woman Should Go; and Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines. (She’s also edited Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010and has contributed, on occasion, to the Observer).

All the Agents and Saints is both an expansion and a deepening of the interests that have driven Elizondo Griest around the globe and, at the same time, ever closer to home. It continues to explore “the state of in-between-ness” that the Aztecs named nepantla in terms that touch, by turn, on geography, culture and autobiography. Its biracial author — a self-described hybrid “gringa/Chicana; cosmopolitan/ cowgirl; agnostic/Catholic; journalist/activist; Type A/free spirit” — continues to employ the project of understanding the “other” as a tool of self-discovery. What’s new is twofold: putting two borders in conversation, and the recent stability of the platform from which Elizondo Griest — now an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — observes the world.

All the Agents and Saints is organized in two parts, one addressing the portion of the southern U.S. border delineated by the Rio Grande — the author’s biographical and ancestral homeland — and the other focused on the more obscure (to Texans) northern border with Canada. It’s 2007 when Elizondo Griest returns to South Texas, inspired by a need to report firsthand the border news that was then defining the region — skyrocketing drug war violence on the Mexican side — and a desire to “finally fuse” a long- bifurcated sense of self. “It seems time,” she writes, “to chart my own South Texas.”

What she finds there, in that frequently mythologized and more frequently demonized “liminal space,” is a land of miraculous cures that she can’t help but doubt and talking trees she refuses to dismiss. She meets Tejanos cornered by the economy into working for Mexican drug cartels or seeking employment with the U.S. Border Patrol. The denizens of Elizondo Griest’s South Texas — citizens and otherwise — are activists, artists, saints, bail bondswomen who moonlight as French restaurateurs, refinery workers and young men who sell weed from the back room of a taco shop. She considers Texas’ portion of the extant border wall in terms of aesthetic possibility and examines “the Dead Book” of deceased migrants in the Brooks County Sheriff’s Office. Finally, in what may be the book’s most vivid and viscerally moving chapter, she re-creates the final journey of a woman whom Elizondo Griest first sees as a decomposed body on a ranch near Falfurrias:

“At some point in the hike, calamity struck. If not an injury, a rape. If not a rape, a raid. Men in jalapeño green materialized out of the wilderness. The travelers saw their headlights and heard their Jeeps and the coyotes yelled and everyone scattered.”

Eventually the woman, either lost or left behind, was reduced to a corpse, one of some four a day that were discovered on remote Brooks County ranchlands in the summer of 2012, forcing the local mortuary to purchase a new cooler in which to store them all.

Observer readers may be familiar with much of Elizondo Griest’s subject matter in Part 1, “The Texas-Mexico Borderlands,” but they are likely to be significantly less well acquainted with the terrain of Part II, “The New York-Canada Borderlands.” The occasion for All the Agents and Saints’ second half is a yearlong visiting professorship at St. Lawrence University in New York state’s North Country, and its subject is the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne.

Like the Tejanos of South Texas, the Mohawks have remained rooted — along the St. Lawrence River, in their case — even as a latter-day international border crossed them. Today, the land and its people are jigsawed by a confusing and frequently contested overlay of national, state, provincial and tribal jurisdictions. And as with Tejano South Texas, those divisions have imposed a cultural, political and personal state of in-between-ness on the Mohawks that manifests, for Elizondo Griest, as an unexpected sense of home.

The parallels present Elizondo Griest with the uncanny opportunity to examine home as an outsider, and she takes that chance without an agenda or program, but with curiosity and humor, a well-honed feel for the rhythms and interruptions of life in a borderland, and not a few flashes of flat-out virtuosic prose.

But Elizondo Griest, belying her acknowledged privilege as an observer, doesn’t just describe her country’s in-between zones in All the Agents and Saints. She inhabits them. And so the book 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.

**Kirkus STARRED Review** April 17, 2017
 
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.
 
Publisher’s Weekly, May 1, 2017
 
Travel writer Elizondo Griest (Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana) meditates on the existential nature and impact of international borderlines through her encounters with people along the Mexican and Canadian borders in the United States. Originally from South Texas, the author brings her personal experience to bear on her journalistic explorations of activism, spirituality, identity, and the law at America’s borders. Considering the “ancestral, cultural, and physical” wounds that fester at the borders, Elizondo Griest glimpses the modern immigrant experience through the lives of people who live in more than one culture. She ventures to casinos and artists’ studios, local shrines and longhouses, and expounds on both the elegance and the insecurity of the hybrid existences led by the people who live in these in-between spaces. Reminiscent of Gloria Anzaldua’s seminal Borderlands/La Frontera, Elizondo Griest’s study of borderlands wrestles with profound questions of identity and belonging in a constantly shifting and increasingly unstable world.
 
Booklist Advanced Review, June 1, 2017
 
Travel writer Elizondo Griest provides testimony about life on both the northern and southern borders of
the U.S. Her own life choices, experiences, and Tejana (Texan descended from the original Spanishspeaking
settlers) heritage provide the foundation for her examination of the nature of borderlands and the
similar lives of two seemingly very different groups of people who live in that space in-between, the
Mexican American Tejanos on the southern border and the Mohawk nation of Akwesasne on the northern
one. Elizondo Griest’s coverage of colonial and postcolonial mistreatment and mayhem reverberates
throughout the book with a persistent drumbeat even as the people she introduces—warm and friendly or
eccentric and wary—dance to their own drummers. As Elizondo Griest examines the culture, history, and
shared humanity of each group through their cultural expressions of faith and spirituality, art and music,
she builds a potent case for the erasure of arbitrary borderlines. This work of exploration and reporting is a
timely reflection on the meaning and nature of much-discussed national boundaries.
 

Author Q&A with Stephanie Elizondo Griest, April 27, 2017

Your first four books are a celebration of wanderlust, which has fueled your travels to nearly 50 countries. Why did you leave the open road for your hometown in South Texas in 2007, and what did you find there?

At some point in my early thirties, nomadism started existentially untethering me. Anything that could have diverted attention from my writing—a house, a partner, a community, a legitimately paying job, children, pets, plants—had been avoided for so long, it had slipped into the realm of the unobtainable. The bulk of my belongings, meanwhile, were scattered in attics around the world. Since nothing tied me down, I kept moving. Yet it was becoming apparent that if I never stood still, nothing ever would. So in 2007, I followed the magnetic pull of home.

To my surprise, the Rio Grande Valley had transformed into a death valley in my absence. Whole swaths of South Texas had been poisoned by petrochemical industries, ravaged by the drug war, and barricaded by a seventy-mile-long steel wall. It had become the nation’s chief crossing ground for undocumented workers as well, unknown hundreds of whom perished in the scrub brush while evading the Border Patrol. My sleepy homeland had become a major news story, and I responded the only way I knew how: by taking reams of notes.

You spent seven years conducting investigative reporting in South Texas, about everything from environmental injustice and illegal immigration to the drug war, poverty, and the obesity epidemic. Yet your narrative is intensely personal as well. What do the borderlands mean for you?

The Texas/Mexico borderline not only bisects my ancestral land. It cuts through my family as well. My mother is Mexican and my father is Kansan. I have long suspected that growing up in a biracial family in the liminal space between nations created an inner fissure in me as well. All my life, I have waffled between extremes: gringa/Chicana; cosmopolite/cowgirl; agnostic/Catholic; journalist/activist; Type A/free spirit. The Aztecs coined a term for living in the state of in-between-ness: nepantla. That is how they described their struggle to reconcile their indigenous ways with the one Spanish colonizers forced upon them in the sixteenth century. More recently, the writer Gloria Anzaldúa turned nepantla into a metaphor for a “birthing stage where you feel like you’re reconfiguring your identity and don’t know where you are.” That is probably why my journey led me back home. After so many years of feeling split in two, I sought to finally fuse.

And yet, All the Agents and Saints isn’t just a meditation about your own homeland. The second half documents life in the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne. What launched that investigation?

The writer John McPhee became a mentor of sorts in 2005-2006, when I was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton. At our last lunch, we talked about the various book ideas he felt he was running out of time to pursue. As a parting gift, he offered one to me: a comparison of the Rio Grande Valley and the St. Lawrence River Valley. I had never even heard of the St. Lawrence River Valley, but I gratefully filed away the idea. Six years later, I played academic roulette and was lucky to land a visiting professorship at St. Lawrence University in far upstate New York, just a few miles south of Canada. When I realized it was the exact same region John McPhee had suggested exploring six years before, my entire being shuddered. And when I started learning about the border struggles of the Mohawks of Akwesasne—who lived a 40-minute drive away—I frantically began taking notes.

But what do Mohawks and Tejanos possibly have in common?

At first glance—nothing. More than 2,000 miles stand between our communities, and—with the exception of Catholicism—our cultures hold little of that ground in common. Mohawks traditionally subsisted on hunting, farming, and fishing in one of the coldest regions of the United States, whereas Tejanos tended cattle in one of the hottest. They are matriarchal; we tend toward machismo. We are fanatical about football; Mohawks don’t just revere lacrosse, they invented it.

Every time I visited Akwesasne, however, I experienced déjà vu. Practically every story I’d heard in half a lifetime in South Texas was echoed there. Just as my ancestors preceded our borderlines by centuries, theirs did, too. Many Tejanos do not speak Spanish anymore because our elders had it humiliated out of them in public school; ditto with Mohawks during their century of Indian Residential Schools. My vaquero (cowboy) elders lost their traditional lifestyle because of corporate buyouts of ranches. Mohawks can no longer support their families hunting, trapping, or fishing due to the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Our fence-line communities are likely being sickened from the toxics released by the petrochemical industry; theirs, by General Motors, ALCOA, and Reynolds. Too many of our youth are imprisoned for smuggling; theirs, for trading. In borders north and south, we must contend with the trafficking of firearms right through our neighborhoods. We die in frightening numbers from diabetes caused by obesity wrought by poverty. We grieve the loss of our land, the loss of our culture, the loss of our dignity. The violations of deeds and treaties. The creation of checkpoints. The abundance of chokepoints. The Predator drones that so often target our own.

At least the Mohawks don’t have a border wall!

Not yet! But they do have a series of bridges that link one part of their nation to another via New York and Ottawa. Any time they leave home—for school, for work, for groceries—they must check in with Customs, a process that can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours. And that enrages them—especially since most Mohawks refuse to acknowledge the border at all. They are a sovereign people who employ their own police force and operate their own library, museum, media, school, and court. They look not to Washington or Ottawa for governance but to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, of which they have been members for centuries. Even though we associate bridges with connectivity, their architecture can be just as oppressive as a wall.

How did spirituality become such a powerful force in this book?

When I first started interviewing the Tejanos most impacted by the injustices I researched—refinery workers and activists, immigrants and drug runners, artists and historians—a pattern emerged. Betrayed by the government and neglected by social services, a surprising number had turned to the supernatural for solace. Time and again, I heard stories of talking trees and healing masses, of wooden madonnas who sprayed glitter from their heads and of Virgins who appeared on grain silos, backing up traffic for miles. The entire Rio Grande Valley seemed steeped in miracles.

When I began spending time with Mohawks—tribal chiefs and medicine women, Black Jack-dealers and social workers, pawnshop owners and clan mothers—I again heard stories that necessitated the suspension of disbelief. Like the time Kateri Tekakwitha (Native America’s first canonized Saint) emerged from the flour someone sprinkled while making dumplings, and everyone came running with their rosaries. Like the traditional Longhouse members who threw fistfuls of tobacco out their backdoors at the first clap of thunder. Like the time I watched one hundred men, women, and children dance and chant for four hours in honor of the first fruit of the summer: the strawberry.

When you live a few miles away from an arbitrary line that drops you into an entirely different consciousness with its own history and culture and references and rules, your mind becomes more receptive to additional imaginative leaps.

What is your own relationship with spirituality?

Like many Tejanos, I grew up Catholic, and—despite my wildly divergent views on everything from abortion to the Vatican—I still claim to be one. It’s practically cultural heritage. I was also weaned on fantastical stories about curanderos who could diagnose what ailed you by tweaking your nose, about brujas wielding horsehair whips, about lady ghosts that wailed down by the river. An inner skeptic, however, was born in journalism school and nurtured in a succession of newsrooms. So that is another tension that animates this book. Not only do I straddle two cultures, I also inhabit the space between faith and doubt.  

Can you tell us about the book’s title, All the Agents & Saints?

Would you believe it was a typo? One morning, I was transcribing a Catholic prayer called the Confiteor that includes the line “all the Angels and Saints.” Only instead of typing the word “angels,” I accidentally wrote “agents.” For years, I had been struggling to find the right title for this book. A little electric current shot through my body when I realized I just did. For better or worse, (Border Patrol) agents and (Catholic) saints are the twin protectorates of our nation’s borderlands. It seemed apt to honor them in this way.

What do you hope people will gain by reading this book? What is its takeaway?

Empathy, for starters. I want U.S. citizens to realize that to be a member of our borderlands is to forever reside on the periphery. It’s a region where your car will be searched, your identity questioned, and your allegiances tested on a back road so remote, no one will hear you when you scream. Because a borderline is an injustice. It is a time-held method of partitioning the planet for the benefit of the elite. Fortunately, we have legions of activists, artists, and faith keepers out there, petitioning on humanity’s behalf, but they need serious reinforcement from the rest of us.

Far too often we hear about the U.S. borderlands only from the politicians who dictate their policies from afar. Rarely do we learn from the descendants of the regions’ early inhabitants. In All the Agents and Saints, I align their stories side by side as testimonio, or a document of witness, of what life there is truly like. Because it’s time to stop sending more “boots on the ground” and start listening to those who are actually rooted there.

What is next for you?

Wanderlust is calling once again. I’ve just been granted a sabbatical from my professorship at UNC-Chapel Hill for Fall 2017. I’ll be spending much of it on book tour, with stops across the northeast and southwest. I’ll also be hard at work on my next book, which explores the sacrifices women make for art. Its research has already taken me to India, Rwanda, Romania, Cuba, and Qatar. Now I’m plotting where to go next.

** Attention, Book Clubs! Stephanie would be delighted to host a discussion with your members via a Skype or conference call. Just drop her a line at Stephanie [at] aroundthebloc [dot] com. **

Here are some questions to get you started:

What surprised you about the similarities between the lives of the Tejanos of South Texas and the Mohawks of Akwesasne? What about their situations seems like a matter of coincidence? What seems like a byproduct of capitalism and/or national policy?

How does the United States compare to its neighbors, Canada and Mexico, in its treatment of border residents?

What could the United States do to enact a more humanitarian immigration policy?

What could the average U.S. citizen do to quell the harm caused by the Drug War?

What could Americans from outside the borderlands do to support those living within?

How would the Trump Administration react to this book?

Who is a better protectorate of the borderlands: agents or saints?

Contemplating the challenges of being biracial/bicultural, the author notes that “One grandmother’s spirit animal is almost by definition another’s demon.” Is that true of your own lived experience?

How did this book challenge or enhance your own sense of spirituality?

What borderland do you inhabit? What lines are you forever crossing?

Chapter XV: The Activist and the Obelisk
has been re-printed by Terrain, available here

Chapter XX: The Words That Come Before All Else
has been re-printed by Aster(ix), available here