July 2018 Book of the Month
All the Agents and Saints
by Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
ISBN-10: 1469631598
ISBN-13: 978-1469631592
SYNOPSIS:
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, before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York / Canada borderlands. 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 and the people who live there.
Author webpage: https://StephanieElizondoGriest.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SElizondoGriest
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephanie.griest
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SElizondoGriest/
BIO:
Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globe-trotting author from South Texas. Her books include the memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004); Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008); All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017); and the best-selling guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, Oxford American, and VQR, and she edited the anthology Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. As a national correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across the United States in a Honda Hatchback named Bertha. Awards include a Henry Luce Scholarship to China, a Hodder fellowship at Princeton University, and the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting. A renowned public speaker, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Visit her website at StephanieElizondoGriest.com.
