All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Memoir, Audiobook, Travel, Latinx, New York

289 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 2017

About the author

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include: Around the Bloc, Mexican Enough, All the Agents and Saints, and Art Above Everything. Widely anthologized, she has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting. Currently Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department.

Reviews

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book deals with very important issues, but I didn’t enjoy reading it. Elizondo Griest—who is from South Texas with Mexican heritage on one side of her family, but spent years as a foreign correspondent—spends the first half of the book writing about the social justice issues in her home community along the border with Mexico, and the second half writing about the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne on the border with Canada, which she visited frequently in a year of working at a nearby college. The Tejano and Mohawk communities have a number of commonalities, including being split by an international border that came along well after their own settlement there, as well as issues of environmental justice, racism, smuggling and poverty.

So there are a lot of important issues in the book, and it was an important reminder for me that we can get too caught up in the manners-and-media-portrayals wing of social justice and lose sight of the fact that people are actually dying. This book spends much of its time on very heavy material: companies polluting local environments, leading to illness, miscarriages, loss of traditional ways of life, and premature death; people lacking access to well-paying, lawful jobs and healthy food; migrants on the southern border being abused and often dying in droves in the desert. The U.S.-Mexico border portion was particularly depressing to me, with the “but there is art and spirituality!” chapters seeming like poor compensation for all the suffering described. The portion about the Mohawk nation also contains some heavy material, but with more community and less death I didn’t find it quite so depressing. The author also clearly knows the Tejano community much better and is an outsider when visiting the Mohawks (and for what it’s worth, I suspect many of these issues are just as common in non-border marginalized communities, though the borders are particularly interesting to the author and that’s fine).

What I didn’t realize before starting this book was that it’s very much structured as a travel book, rather than your typical nonfiction about present-day issues in the U.S., which tends to dive deeper on specific topics and follow those topics and individuals over a more sustained period. The organization worked against my appreciation; it comes across as scattershot, every chapter onto something new, and the only thing tying it all together is the author traveling around meeting these various people and encountering their issues. I wasn’t really interested in the author’s mundane experiences—visiting restaurants and chatting up their proprietors, driving around the countryside observing rundown homes, observing whatever protest happened to occur while she was present, etc. While she does have some personal stake in at least one of these communities, she’s still essentially passing through, while angsting a lot about her mixed-race status and her ethical responsibilities and so on. The issues are worth bringing to people’s attention, but I would have preferred to read a more focused book engaging with particular issues in a sustained way rather than a travel narrative.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've read even a little bit about the US-Mexico border, you will likely be familiar with the saying "We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us." Stephanie Elizondo Griest's All the Agents and Saints begins by examining the ways that this fact has shaped identity among Tejanos (Texans who are culturally descended from the original Spanish-speaking settlers of Texas and northern Mexico). Elizondo Griest, herself Tejana, mixes memoir with reportage, covering many of the issues you would expect in a book discussing the US-Mexico border: immigration (documented and undocumented), the drug trade, religion, and environmental injustice. Throughout, she often refers to the concept of "neplanta" an Aztec concept of a "in-between" space both concrete and emotional, that has been taken up by Chicanos to describe the borderlands that they inhabit between countries, cultures and customs.

But this is not just a book about the southern border. Halfway through, Elizondo Griest takes us nearly two-thousand miles north, where she spends a year as a visiting professor at St. Lawrence University in New York's North Country. Here, she finds another community that has split by an international border, the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. Akwesasne is a Mohawk territory divided by the border between the United States and Canada. Here, Elizondo Griest finds remarkable similarities between this northern border community and the southern border communities covered earlier in the book. Immigration, drugs, and religion, yes, but also that sense of being in-between, or neplanta.

While this could have easily led to a crude "compare-and-contrast" approach, Elizondo Griest discusses these similarities (and the differences too: for example, Akwesasne is theoretically a sovereign territory, southern Texas is not.) with sensitivity. She allows the people she interviewing, both Tejanos and Mohawks, to have their say, and it is through these conversations that the similarities become most apparent. When discussing the fact that most Akwesasne Mohawks do not speak the language, Elizondo Griest thoughtfully reflects on her own experience as a Tejana who has felt disconnected from her own culture for not growing up speaking Spanish and connects this to the efforts made by both American and Canadian governments to suppress the Mohawk and Spanish languages. Rather than drawing attention away from her subjects, her personal experiences are clearly delivered as part of a conversation, not as a monologue.

There are some minor flaws: odd asides here and there that could have been left out (why do we need to know that the only sushi restaurant in Akwesasne wasn't very good? ) and some dubious linguistic claims about the Mohawk language. But these are largely forgivable. All the Agents and Saints is an important contribution to literature about how borders shape culture and identity. While those whose roots are in these borderlands will identify most strongly with the experiences Elizondo Griest documents, this book offers those of us who do not share these experiences a powerful opportunity to understand what exactly it means to live "in-between."

[Jim Prevott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting Audiobook. author explores issues, stories and the culture of her native South Texas borderland after spending years away working as a foreign corespondent. then she goes North to the other border and contrasts similar and differences with the northern border of the US and it's indigenous people. Stories of miracles, faith, struggles, poverty, pollution, crime share the space of both borders.

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to read this book because I had the opportunity to take a creative nonfiction class with the author and I loved it so much. Professor G really cares about her students and is so dedicated to her craft as a writer. It shows in this book. The borderlands are something I understood conceptually but not practically, since I have never been to either the US-Mexico or US-Canada borders. We hear stories, ones that are usually wrapped up in racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, but snippets on Instagram do little to allow us (as people seeking change in the world) to interrogate the idea of borders. To read an almost 300 page book giving life and nuance to the people that inhabit the borderlands was so profoundly impactful, in how it interrogates why these arbitrary lines drawn through land, through people, through made up classifications, have so much impact on all of us. And what, if we could imagine, a world would look like without these borders.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a bit to get into it, but really enjoyed it in the end. The Akwesasne parts made me miss the North Country.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for insight into the arbitrary and deadly mess of enforcing borders. Mexico and Canada would seem to be two very different problem areas, the Mohawk people and South Americans two different peoples, but the author shows through a series of portraits how similar they are. For anyone who wants to know more about who crosses and defends borders, and why.

[meli · Rating 4 out of 5]

i learned a lot in this piece, mostly too about the canadian/US border and how it was also heavily affected after 2001. added a number of new to-read pieces and authors non-fiction and fiction from the border. it makes a difference however, to read a woman's perspective – as she notes many of the artists featured even in photographers that focus on border artist that i was familiar with, due to his work around the sd/tijuana border Stefan Falke, not so many women want to openly do work in the border, as artists or otherwise seems they are always heavily outnumbered.

her intro sets the tone: “But the purpose of this book is not to spotlight the differences in our communities. Those are readily apparent. No, what startled me about Akwesasne was how often I experienced déjà vu there. Practically every major story I;d heard in half a lifetime in South Texas was echoed at some point that year at Akwesasne. Whether the issue was environmental degradation, language loss, drug trafficking, the diabetes epidemic, or confrontations with the Border Patrol, our communities not only had endured the same struggles but had shared similar methods of transcendence as well.”

it is very rare that without having grown up in the border someone gets the daily goings and saying and rituals that go on, and elizondo GETS it, noting this because I really–really– liked this paragraph here, in the New York-Canadian Borderlands chapter, section The War:


“So I tell my friend I had no luck, and you know what he says? Take some antler bone and wrap it up in black silk with a pinch of tobacco and put it in your bra, on the left side next to your heart. Try that and your luck will turn around.”
“Did it work?
“I don't know, I've never done it.”

Why is it that, of the many cities I've lived in –Austin, Seattle, Moscow, Beijing, Brooklyn, Querétaro, Princeton, Iowa City and Washington D.C., to name a few– I overhear conversations like this only in the borderlands? When you live a few miles away from an arbitrary line that places you in an entirely different consciousness with its own history and culture and references and rules, your mind must become more receptive to additional imaginative leaps.

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting take on the similarities and differences between the US' treatment of our Northern and Southern borders. I found the constant "I am seeking myself" memoir-as-journalism thing tiresome.

[Dominika Baran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating account of life in the borderlands. A powerful story, great writing.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the Agents and Saints is a written documentary of life on the southern and northern borders of the United States. For author Stephanie Elizondo Griest, it’s personal. She’s a Tejana from Corpus Christi, near the South Texas border with Mexico, and she spent a year teaching near Akwesasne, the Mohawk Indian territory near the Canadian border. (The introduction of the book helpfully explains identity terms and respectful ways to use them.)

Griest interviews people in South Texas and Akwesasne who represent common issues on the borderlands: immigration, environmental injustice, criminal justice, industry, cultural preservation, and the relationship between the law and personal identity. Most of their stories are presented matter-of-factly and allowed to speak for themselves, with the only analysis coming from Griest’s relationship to the topic in her own life. Fans of Gloria Anzaldúa will appreciate that this is done by Griest’s direct inspiration and modern interpretation of Anzaldúa's borderlands metaphor.

The book's tone is underscored by the oft-repeated borderlands phrase, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” Tejanos and Mohawks are the oldest residents of their ancestral lands, and their citizenship has been decided rather arbitrarily, by treaties and politics. They’re often treated as outsiders whose belonging is constantly questioned and subjected to a disproportionate amount of violence that goes deeper than guns and death. Traditional ways of life have been supplanted by industrialization, systemic racism, and environmental injustices. “In a word, a borderland is an injustice,” Griest writes. “It is a time-held method of partitioning the planet for the benefit of the elite.”

It’s hard to disagree with her assessment. In the north, the border is a grievous affront to the sovereignty of an ancient indigenous people who are forced to navigate 22 different government agencies to continue living in their ancestral homelands. In the south, it’s a force of incalculable violence and loss of life. Even the “good” Border Patrol agents Griest interviews have little more to say about their work than gratitude for a stable income in a remote area and the occasional chance to save someone from a horrific death alone in the desert. The rich and well-connected have little difficulty circumventing border security; the poor and desperate are left at the mercy of predators, law enforcement, and some of the harshest climates on earth. People who live in the borderlands are left to fend for themselves.

Whether by geography, politics, or race, the borderlands are typically a place where people are bitten hard by the metaphorical hand that feeds, with few resources to fight back. Both regions are home to industries that pollute the land with toxic waste—but also provide some of the only legal good jobs in the area. People are reluctant to criticize the industries, even as they suffer from diabetes, cancer, respiratory illnesses, and birth defects linked to industrial pollution. Activists generally find that justice requires intense self-sacrifice and people willing to do millions of dollars of technical work for free.

The physical divide affects cultural perceptions as well. Living in ancestral homelands means accepting less pay and less opportunity, and often worse health and more violence. Tejanos in the U.S. have internalized so much rhetoric about violence in Mexico that they often never cross the border, literally cutting themselves off from family and culture that might be just a short walk away. Mohawks often struggle to leave Akwesasne, wanting a better life but fearing that leaving will culturally remove them further from their heritage. Both groups experienced intense trauma from education systems designed to obliterate their languages, and both groups have internalized racist narratives about whiteness’ link to success. Mohawks and Tejanos also have a fraught relationship with Catholicism, which is experienced as both a system forced on them by colonizers and one of the few cultural practices they’ve successful hybridized and can pass on as their own.

The cycle of geographic isolation and systemic racism repeats itself again in the criminal justice system. Both borders have been militarized for some time, but both Mohawks and Tejanos had recent flashpoint events that increased law enforcement presence and escalated tensions. For Tejanos, it was Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 declaration of war on drug cartels, which exploded violence and forced people to flee north en masse to escape. For Mohawks, it was the 2009 decision for Canadian Border Patrol to carry guns, resulting in intense public demonstrations of resistance. Often, a youthful encounter with law enforcement will leave someone with no opportunity to pursue legal work, and the instant wealth and social status of the drug trade is too tempting to resist in a place with few other opportunities.

If this seems bleak, Griest finds plenty of beauty, perseverance, and adaptation along the way. Almost everyone she interviews is fascinating, hard-working, and community-oriented, doing inspiring grassroots-level work to preserve and restore culture and right some serious injustices. Griest’s writing is travel-oriented, and while critical analysis of what brought the borderlands to this place is mostly absent, she lets people and circumstances speak for themselves. I enjoyed it as a resident of a southern border state familiar with many of these issues, but I really appreciated the glimpse into the northern border, which I really never have to consider as a privileged white American.

All the Agents and Saints demonstrates the deep roots of problems on the borderlands—this clearly isn’t the result of singular legislation or administrations. Despite being published in 2017, there are almost no mentions of Donald Trump (or any other U.S. president), whose anti-immigrant rhetoric and simplistic calls to “build the wall” were surely in the headlines as she wrote this. As a way to better understand how to change borderlands injustice, the book often feels like it’s letting decisionmakers off the hook and shrugging its shoulders, as if to say it’s always been like this and is too big to change. As a portrait of unique places of cultural intersection and politics, I recommend it.

[Jason Chavez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great travelogue by S. Elizondo Griest. This is a great study and review on the differences
and similarities on border life and ritual between the northern and southern United States, both with a common denominator of what is in between.

[Erin Conway · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get through, but this book is full of interesting and enlightening stories from the borders.

[Angela Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping and engaging. Griest's lyrical narrative prose is a cry for change, tracing the true Texas from its glory to gory tales. From artists to bondsmen to saints and curanderos, to border agents and border crossers, Griest paints a vivid image of some of Texas's most notorious and nefarious characters, bringing a desperately needed human touch to several of our country's greatest quandaries- including immigration, drugs, and environmentalism. A carefully woven patchwork of people confronting the political mess that is Texas. Also examines Canadian borders and indigenous rights. Worth every page. Daring and bold, an exceptional collection of stories.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captivating blend of journalism and memoir. Partly stories I knew (at least to some extent) but had never seen told quite this way, partly stories I felt rattled to learn were happening in my country without my ever having heard them before. This book is about big and frustrating topics, and Elizondo Griest treats them with so much empathy and the right balance of hope and cynicism.

[Andrew Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. I highly recommend to anyone who wants to gain more insight into border life, both the south and north.

[Catherine Woodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book through an article about what to read instead of American Dirt if you wanted to know more about the immigrant experience, the culture and the motivation of those who cross the border. This book, written by a woman described as a creative non-fiction writer, is an exploration of the effect of borders on cultures that they separate. She is a self-described Tejana, someone whose family has lived for centuries on both sides of the Mexico-Texas border, who freely crossed it on a weekly if not a daily basis. When the metal wall started being erected it separated people on either side of, it made transiting it more difficult and therefore less common for those who did so for family and friends, but no less transited by those who cross to leave what they had behind. She does explore the dangerousness of the situation, both to stay in Central America and to leave.

The other culture that she explores is that of a people who live on either side of the northern border, the Mohawk Nation's Akwesasne territory. She lived amongst them, interviewing them to tell their story of being neither recognized nor respected as a nation, and the continual assaults on their territory, their sovereignty, and their way of life. It is eye opening and a wonderful read.

[kendall · Rating 4 out of 5]

i actually have no critiques in terms of writing. it’s a very relatable account of what it’s like to be mixed race and the caveats that come with not being enough to one culture. i dislike the amount of times drug smuggling is mentioned, but after further analysis, it makes a point of how deeply drugs have something to do with who we are perceived as a people (speaking as someone from the Borderlands). we are not artists or musicians or authors but often just drug smugglers and wetbacks to those who only know us from Fox News. the second half is incredibly well written; i have no input because it’s not a culture I’m familiar with, but Griest makes sure you not only have some familiarity with the culture of the people of the Haudenosaunee that she meets, but you have a profound empathy and respect for them that makes you want to rip your heart out and place it on their doorsteps as an apology for the suffering they’ve endured, and still endure. i wish i could read this book over again, recommend it to all people i’ve ever met. it’s truly an incredible book.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

What initially appears to be a book about two borderland communities (the Tejanos on the southern US border and the Mohawks on the northern US border) ends up being a memoir mixed with reporting as the author attempts to make sense of her own sense of identity limbo. IMO not many authors who attempt such a narrative balance succeed. Griest (mostly) does.

[Maggie Shanley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative look at the lands along Northern and Southern borders of the United States. There are disturbing similarities among the communities there that are the result of nation making. I learned so much from this book and could have quoted huge sections, but I will spare you. If you are curious about our borderlands, read this book.

[Shelby Lehman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting. Somethings were difficult to hear, but imagine it’s worse to live through. I felt like it was Erin Brocovich - at the border. The similarities between the northern and southern borders is quite remarkable.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and certainly worthwhile read that touches on a variety of issues related to life and death in the US borderlands, both north and south. At times I did find it a little too meandering, and could have done with less superstitious/"spiritual" stuff.

[Chloe Winther · Rating 5 out of 5]

EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The contrast and similarities of the US/ Méxican and the US/Canadian borders conveyed by Griest provided me with new and thought provoking perspectives.

[Jennie]

"The only proper response to privilege is to grip it like a baseball bat and shatter injustice with all of your might."

[David Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://thinkinthemorning.com/crossin...

[Didi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got bored reading it. I'm sure it's powerful and all, just not my type of genre and too objective.

[Sarah left GR]

From this list of books about the U.S.-Mexico border:
https://bookriot.com/2018/05/06/books...

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dual focus of this book (southern and northern borders) seemed like it shouldn't work, but it does. It's a complex exploration of the ways in which borders affect the lives of the people who live on them or with them.