Against the American Grain
Against the American Grain
A Borderlands History of Resistance
A century ago, William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain profiled Anglo, French, and Spanish conquistadors, tyrants, preachers, and thought leaders who first shaped American culture. Since then, waves of resistance and disruptive innovation have flooded into the rest of America from the arid, southwestern margins of the US-Mexico borderlands.
Now, in Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan—cultural ecologist, environmental historian, and lyric poet of the American Southwest—illuminates the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. Whether Indigenous, LatinX, priests, nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it is the resisters, performers, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins who are constantly reshaping America. They have, against all odds, recolored and recovered the future of North America through outrageous acts of resistance.
After reading the stories of Estevanico el Moro, Maria de Ágreda, Teresita de Cábora, Coyote Iguana, Woody Guthrie, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Reyes Lopez Tijerana, Arturo Sandoval, Lalo Guererro, John Fife, Danny and Luis Valdez, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, and many more, we can never think about America the same way again. In Nabhan’s magisterial, radical recounting, cross-cultural collaborations have changed the grain of American life to one that is many-colored, once again flourishing with fragrance, faith, and fecund ideas.
“Gary Paul Nabhan places the desert at the center of the ongoing struggle against colonialism, racism, and capitalism.”—Catherine Keyser, author of Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions
“From this gallery of visionaries, rogues, dissidents, authors, and naturalists, a new American mythos begins to emerge.”—Thomas Hallock, author of Happy Neighborhood: Essays and Poems
Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese American ecologist, agrarian activist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and bilingual essayist whose work focuses primarily on the arid binational Southwest. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and an Utne Reader’s annual visionary award, and he is the author of thirty-two books, beginning with The Desert Smells Like Rain. His most recent book is Agave Spirits. He resides in Patagonia, Arizona, and Desemboque del Sur, Sonora.
Introduction
A Note (or Apology) About Changing Names, Dialects, and Local Idioms
Chapter One. Resistance: Indigenous Elders Walking the Line
Chapter Two. Metamorphosis: Mustafa al-Zemmouri and Cabeza de Vaca
Chapter Three. Volition: Maria de Ágreda, Jumanos Captain Tuerto, and Enrique Madrid
Chapter Four. Abyss: Francisco Garcés and Salvador Palma
Chapter Five. Indigenous Nationhood: Juan de Banderas and Padre Pedro Leyva
Chapter Six. Race: Coyote Iguana and Lola Casanova
Chapter Seven. Rebellion: Joaquín Murrieta Orozco and Alfredo Acosta Figueroa
Chapter Eight. Revolution: Teresita de Cábora and Lauro Aguirre
Chapter Nine. Dust: Woody Guthrie and Tim Z. Hernandez
Chapter Ten. Steinbeck and Ricketts: Broken Men Breaking Through
Chapter Eleven. Reies López Tijerina and Arturo Sandoval
Chapter Twelve. Boycott: César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Fred Ross
Chapter Thirteen. Huelga en General: Lalo Guerrero and Danny and Luis Valdez
Chapter Fourteen. Sanctuary: Jim Corbett, Ramón Dagoberto Quinones, and John Fife
Acknowledgments
Further Reading and Cited Literature
