Missive #584

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,This book is much different that those that I have read previously by this author. It still is about the Sonora desert in Mexico and the Southwest but the focus is historical rather than on the plants and geology. Well worth reading. 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, 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.

“The desert is very simple to survive in. You must only admit that there is something larger than you … the wind … the dryness … the distance.… You accept that, and everything is fine.… The desert will provide.… If you do not, the desert will break you.” — Nohou Agab

A ‘news’ story headline that made me say “DUH”.
Burned Body Found Hanging from Houston Railroad Freeway Overpass — Homicide Suspected, Say Police

The government has been “shut down” for three weeks. Can you tell? Can you walk down the street and see what’s missing? Can you smell it in the air? Can you see it in people’s faces? Can you see what important service we’re not getting? Can you see what better thing should be done?
I can’t. If it weren’t for social media (and propaganda wearing the costume of “news”) I wouldn’t be able to detect a shut down. What thing is not happening now that was happening three weeks ago? — Three Weeks by AdaptiveCurmudgeon

The posting for Sunday was late but has been posted.