Against the American Grain

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.

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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.