Against the American Grain
Against the American Grain
A Borderlands History of Resistance
“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
In Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan—cultural ecologist, environmental historian, Franciscan Brother, and lyrical poet of the American Southwest—has illuminated the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. Whether they were Indigenous, LatinX, Catholic priests and nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it has been the resisters, performance artists, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins of society who constantly reshape the faces and fabric of America. Their stories are rarely told, let alone woven into a cohesive fabric. They are the ones who have recolored and recovered the future of North America by outrageous acts of resistance against all odds.
After reading the stories of María de Ágreda, Joaquin Murrieta, Teresita de Cábora, Coyote Iguana, Woody Guthrie, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, John Steinbeck, and others, we can never think about America in the same way. In Nabhan’s magisterial, radical recounting, cross-cultural collaborations have changed the grain of American life to one that is many-colored, 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.
