Stephanie Elizondo Griest - All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

PRAISE FOR All the Agents and Saints

Elizondo Griest, belying her acknowledged privilege as an observer, doesnt just describe her countrys in-between zones in All the Agents and Saints. She inhabits them. And so the book offers much more than just a very smart and companionable tour of the countrys ragged edges. It offers a model for how a curious person, any person who is sufficiently interested, can begin to navigate the boundaries that compartmentalize our country, and ourselves, toward wholeness.

BRAD TYER, Texas Observer

Some books that you read affect you emotionally because you insert yourself into the story and partially absorb the plotline. Other books can change your destiny. Such is the work combining all of the above by Stephanie Elizondo Griest in All the Agents and Saints.

CHARLES KADER, Indian Country News Media

What emerges [in All the Agents and Saints] is a strikingly woven tapestry of border life; its an authentic representation thats mostly missing from the public discourse. Elizondo Griest refutes the single narrative about the borders and shows readers the humor, spirituality, and beauty of the people there.

BEATRIZ TERRAZAS, Dallas Morning News

[Elizondo Griests] writing about the struggles of people on virtually all sides of every international border dazzles the minds eye with its combination of earnestness, self-deprecation, and the undiluted curiosity of a born reporter.

MARC SAVLOV, Austin Chronicle

Elizondo Griest, the world traveler, brings us another thoughtful account of yet another pilgrimage to give us all a vicarious look into places we wouldnt otherwise know about. We will listen again on the news to the politicians dictating policies about borders and walls. With All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest brings us the testimonies of those who actually witness life there and know the real story.

YVETTE BENAVIDES, San Antonio Express-News

In All the Agents and Saints, author-journalist Stephanie Elizondo Griest comes home and finds her true identity in an important ethnographic and sociological book that is easily one of the best books of the year [and] establishes herself as one of the top young Hispanic authors in the country.

DR. MANUEL FLORES, Corpus Christi Caller-Times

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 Anzalduas seminal Borderlands/La Frontera, Elizondo Griests study of borderlands wrestles with profound questions of identity and belonging in a constantly shifting and increasingly unstable world.

Publishers Weekly

As Elizondo Griest examines the culture, history, and shared humanity of each group through its 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.

Booklist

Elizondo Griest travels fearlessly and openly, compelling us to face the realities of the leaking wound at the borders between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. We see their physical boundaries, their artistic reinventions, their scanner-eyed objectifying patrols, and their borderlands people, most of all. What makes these dispatches worthy are their humanity and brutal power. A blazing, page-turning, groundbreaking, soul-illuminating book.

JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, Poet Laureate of the United States

Stephanie Elizondo Griest complicates everything we think we know about immigration, migration, and life on a borderwhere survival and legacy intersect with race, policy, and the unearthly divine. Elizondo Griest writes with such elegance and authenticity that shell make you understand how arbitrary borders [that are] meant to divide people, cultures, governments, and even ideas can sometimes be the very places we find each other. A luminous and urgent story.

RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER, author of No Visible Bruises and Fugitive Denim

All the Agents and Saints is a beautiful book that takes us into the world of contemporary borderlands in a way that both breaks the heart and heals it. Only a seasoned travel writer like Stephanie Elizondo Griest could succeed so wonderfully in turning a journey to both the northern and southern borders of the United States into a profound meditation on the meaning of home and homecoming in an age of unprecedented global displacement. A stunning book with an urgent message of peace for our times.

RUTH BEHAR, author of Traveling Heavy and Translated Woman

Stephanie Elizondo Griest takes the reader with her on an exploratory journey that examines the histories and lifestyles within the Borderlands. Her stories are colorful and descriptive, and its refreshing to see a writer mingle and indeed become engaged within our community as an independent third party.

CHIEF BRIAN DAVID, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne

Beautifully written with force, empathy, and passion, All the Agents and Saints is required reading for those wishing to transcend the ignorance and indifference that drives so much of the social and political divisions of our day.

DR. DAVID-JAMES GONZALES, New Books Network

What gives this book a unique angle on the borders are unjust theme is the humanity and personality of Elizondo Griests borderlands exploration. This book, while adequately touching on the conceptual issues of territory, hybridity, and transnationalism, adds an emotional depth and human side.

DR. ANDREW M. HILBURN, Journal of Latin American Geography

The multitalented globe-trotting writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest has developed a mix of writing that blends testimonio, travel writing, critical nonfiction, thoughtful interviews, archival research, and profound meditations. She has turned her [voice] into a powerful tool to fight injustices that take the form of environmental destruction, sexual violence, cultural erasure, ethnic displacement, racism, sexism, and other maladies. Her books reveal the urgency, the beauty, and the significance of the lives that she narrates.

CRISTBAL GARZA-GONZLEZ, Chiric Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures

ALL THE AGENTS AND SAINTS

ALSO BY STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST

Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana

100 Places Every Woman Should Go

Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines

Best Womens Travel Writing 2010 (editor)