Against the American Grain : A Borderlands History of Resistance

In this book, Gary Paul Nabhan has illuminated the outlines of a history too long in the shadows. The resisters, performance artists, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins of society constantly reshape the faces and fabric of America but their stories are rarely told, let alone woven into a cohesive fabric.

A celebration of the artists, activists, writers and resisters from the borderlands of the American Southwest. James Beard Award winning Nabhan (Agave Spirits) profiles agents of change like Dolores Huerta, John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez, and many more.

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, Tim X. Hernandez, 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.