Against the American Grain - by Gary Paul Nabhan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

New in paper, James Beard Award winning Nabhan (Agave Spirits) creative revolutionaries from the southwest border who change American culture in countless positive ways. A celebration of the artists, activists, and writers who are not Anglo-centric.

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 Guerrero, 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.

Review Quotes

"Against the American Grain could not be more timely: it performs the complementary tasks of reminding us that the good fight is a lot less lonely when contemplated alongside the resistances of recent history, and that the true exception in the American identity lies in its running against the grain of all the -isms."--Rubén Martínez, author of Desert America: A Journey through Our Most Divided Landscape

"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

"With his lyrical biographies of mystics, activists, rabble-rousers, singers, trailblazers, and outlaws, Gary Paul Nabhan places the desert at the center of the ongoing struggle against colonialism, racism, and capitalism. He celebrates the spiritual and social gains of thinkers and dreamers who go 'against the American grain.'"--Catherine Keyser, author of Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions

About the Author

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.