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

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

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.

Country	USA
Author	Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9781469631608
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	The University of North Carolina Press
Manufacturer	The University of North Carolina Press
NumberOfPages	301
PublicationDate	2017-05-08
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
ReleaseDate	2017-05-08
Studio	The University of North Carolina Press

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