PRESS

• 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
• Excerpted, Orion Magazine
• Excerpted, Aster(ix) Literary Journal
• Excerpted, Terrain: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments
• 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
  NBC News & NBC Latino
  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
  Macleans of Canada
  Texas Observer
  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
  San Antonio Express News
  Corpus Christi Caller-Times
  Publisher’s Weekly
  Texas Public Radio – Review by Yvette Benavides
  Austin Chronicle
  Ahora Si/Austin American-Statesman
  Shelf Awareness
  Texas Monthly
  BookList
  Carolina Alumni Review Magazine
  Chapel Hill Magazine
  KKUP “Out of Our Minds” radio show with Rachelle Escamilla
  Texas Standard, KUT Austin
  Indian Country Media Network
  The Columbus Dispatch
  La Bloga
  Alcalde, May/June 2017
  Daily Tarheel
  New Moon Girls Magazine, Summer 2018
  

REVIEWS

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 2010 and 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.

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. In Akwesasne she finds, again, a community of activists and artists responding to and resisting division. She finds, again, colonia-style poverty, leavened not by a booming Border Patrol infrastructure, but by legal tribal casinos and reservation cigarette shops. She finds, again, a movement to canonize an indigenous saint. She finds another river, also polluted, that’s become notorious as a conduit for the smuggling of drugs and people. And she befriends, among other people, an Akwesasne woman named Brenda, a sort of North Country doppelganger for the author, in whose reflection she sees the conflicted struggle to fuse a divided identity, an example of nepantla personified: “To always question, to always doubt, and to always, always ache.”
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 Spanish-speaking 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.