All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition Read online

  PRAISE FOR All the Agents and Saints

  “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.”

  —BRAD TYER, Texas Observer

  “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

  “What emerges [in All the Agents and Saints] is a strikingly woven tapestry of border life; it’s an authentic representation that’s mostly missing from the public discourse. … Elizondo Griest refutes the single narrative about the borders and shows readers the humor, spirituality, and beauty of the people there.”

  —BEATRIZ TERRAZAS, Dallas Morning News

  “[Elizondo Griest’s] writing about the struggles of people on virtually all sides of every international border dazzles the mind’s eye with its combination of earnestness, self-deprecation, and the undiluted curiosity of a born reporter.”

  —MARC SAVLOV, Austin Chronicle

  “Elizondo Griest, the world traveler, brings us another thoughtful account of yet another pilgrimage to give us all a vicarious look into places we wouldn’t otherwise know about. … We will listen again on the news to the politicians dictating policies about borders and walls. With All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest brings us the testimonies of those who actually witness life there and know the real story.”

  —YVETTE BENAVIDES, San Antonio Express-News

  “In All the Agents and Saints, author-journalist Stephanie Elizondo Griest comes home and finds her true identity in an important ethnographic and sociological book that is easily one of the best books of the year … [and] establishes herself as one of the top young Hispanic authors in the country.”

  —DR. MANUEL FLORES, Corpus Christi Caller-Times

  “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.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “As Elizondo Griest examines the culture, history, and shared humanity of each group through its 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.”

  —Booklist

  “Elizondo Griest travels fearlessly and openly, compelling us to face the realities of the leaking wound at the borders between the United States, 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. Elizondo Griest writes with such elegance and authenticity that she’ll make you understand how arbitrary borders [that are] meant to divide people, cultures, governments, and even ideas can sometimes be the very places we find each other. A luminous and urgent story.”

  —RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER, author of No Visible Bruises and Fugitive Denim

  “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 and Translated Woman

  “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 and 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

  “Beautifully written with force, empathy, and passion, All the Agents and Saints is required reading for those wishing to transcend the ignorance and indifference that drives so much of the social and political divisions of our day.”

  —DR. DAVID-JAMES GONZALES, New Books Network

  “What gives this book a unique angle on the “borders are unjust” theme is the humanity and personality of Elizondo Griest’s borderlands exploration. This book, while adequately touching on the conceptual issues of territory, hybridity, and transnationalism, adds an emotional depth and human side.”

  —DR. ANDREW M. HILBURN, Journal of Latin American Geography

  “The multitalented globe-trotting writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest has developed a mix of writing that blends testimonio, travel writing, critical nonfiction, thoughtful interviews, archival research, and profound meditations. … She has turned her [voice] into a powerful tool to fight injustices that take the form of environmental destruction, sexual violence, cultural erasure, ethnic displacement, racism, sexism, and other maladies. Her books reveal the urgency, the beauty, and the significance of the lives that she narrates.”

  —CRISTÓBAL GARZA-GONZÁLEZ, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

  ALL THE AGENTS AND SAINTS

  ALSO BY STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST

  Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana

  100 Places Every Woman Should Go

  Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines

  Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 (editor)

  ALL THE AGENTS AND SAINTS

  Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

  Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

  THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

  Chapel Hill

  This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

  © 2017 Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  Preface to the paperback edition © 2020 Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

  Cover illustration: Ana Teresa Fernández, Erasing the Border (Performance Documentation) (2016), oil on canvas, 68 × 42 in. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris

  ISBN 978-1-4696-5924-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-46
96-5925-1 (ebook)

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this book as follows:

  Names: Elizondo Griest, Stephanie, 1974– author.

  Title: All the agents and saints : dispatches from the U.S. borderlands / Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

  Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016047328 | ISBN 9781469631592 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469631608 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—Texas. | Mohawk Indians—New York (State) | Mexican-American Border Region. | Canadian-American Border Region.

  Classification: LCC F395.M5 E45 2017 | DDC 972/.1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047328

  Portions of chapters 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, and 18 were originally published, respectively, in Sangam House Reader, vol. 3 (New York: Sangam House, 2015); the Dallas Morning News, September 12, 2010; Earth Island Journal, Spring 2012, 38–43; Oxford American, Spring 2015, 62–75; Oxford American, Fall 2013, 35–37; and The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Travelers’ Tales, 2015), 120–28; and Witness, Winter 2014, http://witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/volume-27-number-3-winter-2014/three-nations-crossing/.

  FOR MY HOMELAND, CORPITOS

  CONTENTS

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Introduction The Descendants

  Prologue Nepantla

  Part I The Texas-Mexico Borderlands

  1 The Miracle Tree

  2 The Rebel

  3 The Venerable

  4 The Activist and the Ordinance

  5 The Bonder and the Dealer

  6 The Agents

  7 The Wall

  8 The Chokepoint

  9 The Woman in the Woods

  10 The Healing

  Part II The New York–Canada Borderlands

  11 The Sort of Homecoming

  12 The Trade

  13 The War

  14 The Saint

  15 The Activist and the Obelisk

  16 The Movement

  17 The Mother Tongue

  18 The Bridge

  19 The River

  20 The Words That Come Before All Else

  Epilogue The United States of In-between

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  MAPS

  U.S.-Mexican border

  U.S.-Canadian border

  Akwesasne, at the U.S.-Canadian border

  PREFACE

  The Resistance

  AFTER SPENDING THE BETTER PART of a decade working on All the Agents and Saints, I submitted its final draft, bleary-eyed but euphoric, in October 2016. Four weeks later, the red wave that doused the U.S. electoral map threatened to render the book obsolete before it even went to press. Journalists take pride in writing the first rough drafts of history, but creative nonfiction writers aspire for timelessness—or at least timeliness. Yet the United States had just elected a president whose rallying cry was “Build that wall.” Who said of Mexican migrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” The 2016 election felt like a game-changer for U.S. border policy. It seemed I should at least update the introduction, but what would I say? My shock was so great, my thoughts tended toward the magical. (“Maybe he won’t be inaugurated?”) Ultimately, I left the manuscript intact, as a record of life in the U.S. borderlands prior to the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

  Four days into his administration, Trump revived plans to construct two major oil pipelines that would defile sacred Native land and poison drinking water. The day after that, he ordered a sweeping crackdown on undocumented migration, declaring: “A nation without borders is not a nation.” Within a week, he had banned citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Within a month, he had declared the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN to be the enemy of the American people. It felt like marbles were falling from the sky, each one representing another critical issue. You couldn’t chase them all. You’d trip if you even tried. So I set my gaze on the marbles I cared about most—the borderlands—as I prepared for this book’s summer 2017 release.

  Two weeks into my thirty-city book tour, however, my abdomen started aching. Eating induced a sensation of fullness inside my chest. Acid reflux scorched my throat. I attributed this to all of the celebratory enchilada platters I was devouring in Texas—until I woke up bleeding. A doctor placed her hands on my belly and asked if I was pregnant.

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I thought for a moment, then joked: “Well, I am Catholic. …”

  She dispatched me to a radiologist whose eyes grew round as she snapped image after image after image. My ovaries had indeed bred something. Only, it wasn’t a child. It was a mucinous tumor the size of an oblong basketball. After years of hearing tumor horror stories in borders north and south, I had grown my own—so big, surgeons had to remove two liters of fluid before they could pull it out of me. When I awoke from the procedure, the oncologist sadly informed me that I had received a hysterectomy. In that moment, however, the thought of losing a hypothetical child wasn’t nearly as painful as the reality of abandoning a book that had just been published.

  “When can I fly?” I asked.

  Six weeks, the oncologist said. That meant canceling nearly twenty events, but maybe I could still present at the Texas Book Festival. This became my recovery goal. Yet an outfit called the Tumor Board was still examining what my ovaries had grown. A week later, the oncologist called to say the tumor was cancerous. Fewer than half of the women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive even five years. I would undergo chemotherapy as soon as I recovered from surgery.

  How could this be? My family had no history of ovarian cancer. Extensive genetic testing yielded no predisposition for it, either. I was a forty-three-year-old yoga practitioner who ate mostly tofu and kale (unless there was a taqueria nearby). My major risk factor seemed to be the polluted environment where I grew up, as detailed in chapters 2, 4, and 15 of this book. This theory gained traction when I learned that my childhood next-door neighbor had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Never had I felt so connected to my homeland as I did when a nurse wearing a makeshift hazmat suit inserted an IV into the port sewn inside my chest so that Taxol and Carboplatin could flow into my veins.

  A BOOK’S PREFACE IS GENERALLY where authors offer updates about the people and places readers will encounter in the pages that ensue, but I must admit: I lost my marbles during chemo. Even after the oncologist released me from treatment, proposed changes to border policy came so rapidly—and erratically—I struggled to keep track. And no wonder: on the campaign trail, Trump initially said his new border wall would measure thirty feet high, but then he started adding (and occasionally subtracting) five to ten feet in subsequent speeches until it reached sixty-five feet. Once in office, he used 800,000 young migrants protected from deportation by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as a bargaining chip to fund the wall by furloughing federal workers during government shutdowns. When gang violence grew so frightening in Central America that tens of thousands fled for their lives, Trump launched a “zero tolerance” policy that separated families at the border with no plan on how to reunite them. Mothers and fathers were sent to detention centers, while their children—some, just toddlers—fended for themselves at shelters offering little more than a mat on the concrete floor and a bologna sandwich. Facilities were so overcrowded, some detainees had to drink from the toilet.

  I didn’t return to a U.S. borderland myself until March 2018, when the library at the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne hosted me for a reading. I had every intention of asking about the latest developments in Mohawk sovereignty, but that plan dissolved as the library filled with the people featured in chapters 12 through 20. I only wanted to hug everyone. They, in turn, rubbed the peach fuzz atop my head and shared remedies they
had learned from cancers they had known. My friend Keetah took me to dinner at the casino afterward. Over salmon steaks, I remembered how, twenty years ago, Trump had secretly funded an ad campaign against her Nation when it tried to open a casino in the Catskills that could have lured patrons away from the three casinos he owned in Atlantic City. How, I asked, had his presidency impacted Akwesasne thus far?

  She rolled her eyes. “We’ve been oppressed for 500 years,” she said. “Some administrations are worse than others, but none ever do right by us.”

  As illustrated in this book, Mohawks have indeed endured every violence, from environmental racism and attempted cultural erasure to treaty violations, including land theft. Looking around the restaurant, however, it felt somewhat hopeful to see Mohawk families dining out that night, some celebrating birthdays while a nearby couple toasted with their wine glasses. Just outside the door, gamblers from around the world were blowing money that the Nation could—after New York State took its quarter share—funnel into social programs as well as land re-acquisition. In just a few months, the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe would buy back 240 acres it lost in the nineteenth century, with plans to build houses there, along with a birthing center, a cemetery, and a solar farm. Across the river, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne was on the verge of re-acquiring land lost to Canada, too.

  Following my gaze, Keetah grinned. “We are still here!”

  I chant this like a mantra whenever I read another rough draft of history filed by a border reporter. Yes, the situation here is bad. Egregious, really. That has been the case since the lines were first drawn centuries ago, and it will continue to be so until the final wall falls and divisions fade away. Then as now: our resilience is our greatest resistance.