All the Agents and Saints

May 1, 2017
Travel writer Elizondo Griest (Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana) meditates on the existential nature and impact of international borderlines through her encounters with people along the Mexican and Canadian borders in the United States. Originally from South Texas, the author brings her personal experience to bear on her journalistic explorations of activism, spirituality, identity, and the law at America’s borders. Considering the “ancestral, cultural, and physical” wounds that fester at the borders, 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 Anzaldúa’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.

Starred review from May 1, 2017
An exploration of the borderlands that deftly mixes memoir, groundbreaking sociology, deep reporting, and compelling writing.A child of the parched Texas-Mexico border, Elizondo Griest (Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, 2008, etc.) found herself teaching on a Mohawk Indian reservation that straddled the frigid New York state-Canadian border. At first, the author could not perceive any significant similarities between the two border experiences other than the deep roots of Catholicism. However, as the months passed, she began to realize the commonalities between borderlands shot through with poverty, cruelty by law enforcement agencies, language wars, environmental degradation, poor schools, ill health, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and extraordinarily high death tolls, including suicides. As Elizondo Griest documents the plight of border occupants, she struggles with defining herself within her mixed-race background. She has thought of herself as a mix of Tejana, Chicana, and Latina, but people outside her family usually viewed her as a gringa due to her unusually light skin and blue eyes. But as she began to understand, the borderland existence is the most defining factor of all. Portions of the author's findings as a reporter are graphic, especially as she chronicles her travels with law enforcement officers to retrieve rotting bodies of Mexicans who died trying to cross rugged territory in Texas or Arizona to establish a life in the U.S. Perhaps the most revelatory portions of the book are the sections about the already existing wall on stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, barriers predating the rise of Donald Trump. The chapters about the Mohawk struggles are quite likely to seem revelatory, too, given the dearth of national journalism coverage of that region. In this well-conceived book, the author demonstrates unforgettably that national borders constitute much more than lines on a map.

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June 1, 2017
Travel writer Elizondo Griest provides testimony about life on both the northern and southern borders of the U.S. Her own life choices, experiences, and Tejana (Texan descended from the original Spanish-speaking settlers) heritage provide the foundation for her examination of the nature of borderlands and the similar lives of two seemingly very different groups of people who live in that space in-between, the Mexican American Tejanos on the southern border and the Mohawk nation of Akwesasne on the northern one. Elizondo Griest's coverage of colonial and postcolonial mistreatment and mayhem reverberates throughout the book with a persistent drumbeat even as the people she introduceswarm and friendly or eccentric and warydance to their own drummers. As Elizondo Griest examines the culture, history, and shared humanity of each group through their 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)