Moments of resistance: 'Against the American Grain' a fresh take on historical figures, perspectives of the borderlands of the U.S., Mexico

If a single word could describe his new book, “Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance,” Gary Paul Nabhan would likely call it a “mosaic.”

The 14 essays form connective pieces of a whole, and each will challenge readers. That’s a good thing. The challenges reward readers with fresh takes on historical figures and fresh historical perspectives of the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, the ethnic diversity, and the contributions marginalized Indigenous people and immigrants have made.

Moments of resistance: 'Against the American Grain' a fresh take on historical figures, perspectives of the borderlands of the U.S., Mexico

Nabhan’s essays flow chronologically, peering at moments and movements of resistance.

His introduction explains the resistance to the dominant culture of America.

“Twenty generations of U.S. citizens had been trained or lulled into thinking that North America was settled from east to west, thanks to ‘Manifest Destiny’ and to the obsession with ‘land development’ among entrepreneurial immigrants from Western Europe,” Nabhan writes.

“They contended that America was ‘pristine’ and its First Peoples ‘primitive,’ rather than recognizing the 5,500 years of agriculture, management of fire and water and artistic engineering of gigantic earthen mounds and temples across the continent.”

What’s more, historians have belatedly or begrudgingly ignored the contributions of Pacific Islanders and Asian immigrants (Japanese, Chinese and Filipinos) to the history of the Pacific coast, from San Francisco down to Oaxaca, Mexico, Nabhan adds.

The book dives into what the author believes are previously hidden elements of resistance on both sides of the border.

The first chapter considers how the religious leaders of the Yaqui Indians in northern Mexico must have smelled a “sultry, sulfurous wind” to indicate that intruders were headed for their homelands in 1533. The intruders were indentured soldiers of other tribes (Nahuatl, Purépecha and Tlaxcalan) led by Spanish conquistadors. The soldiers were ordered to capture thousands of Yaqui as slaves.

The Yaquis met the invaders with what Nabhan described as a slow, hypnotic dance while throwing fistfuls of leaves, red dust and sacred flowers the Yaquis believed could rout their enemy. They did.

Each year since, Nabhan writes, thousands of Indigenous people of many tribes still commemorate that encounter.

The second chapter asks readers to rethink the time and the origin of the first Black person coming to the New World. Nabhan argues that the historical figure known as Estevan deserves more recognition.

Estevan accompanied, guided and probably saved the lives of three conquistadors. The quartet were shipwrecked and then persevered on a years-long trek and encounters with hostile and friendly Natives around the Gulf Coast through the Chihuahuan Desert and south to Mexico City.

Estevan later headed back north to Zuni Pueblo, where he may have been killed. Also called Estevanico el Moro and Mustafa al-Zemmouri, he survived, Nabhan writes, as a slave for the Portuguese, a Christianized Ladino, an indentured sailor/servant for the Spanish, and in the New World as a traveling herbalist and faith-healer, and a charismatic shaman.

Nabhan devotes a chapter to the 17th century Spanish nun Sor María de Ágreda, known for her spiritual connection to the Jumanos tribe in the American desert. She conjured flora and fauna that the other Franciscan nuns in the convent had never seen before. That’s because they resembled the yucca, roadrunners, barrel cactus and ocotillos that are in the New World. Strange visions, because María hardly ever left the monastery. Yet she believed she traveled among the Jumanos, exchanging ideas with them even though they spoke different languages.

Jumanos families along the Rio Grande, Pecos River and Conchos River claimed they wanted to reunite with “a lady in blue” — Sor María — who appeared to them out of thin air to cure the sick, scare off the devil and teach them of Jesus and Mary.

A later chapter focuses on famed Oklahoma-born folksinger/songwriter Woody Guthrie. He wrote the Western swing classic “Oklahoma Hills” and the memorable “This Land Is Your Land.” He left the Dust Bowl for California, but he hitchhiked west through the deserts of southern New Mexico and Arizona, even crossing White Sands on foot, Nabhan writes.

A hobo, Woody developed an empathy for the plight of the oppressed, repressed and depressed, Nabhan writes.

Writer John Steinbeck is the main subject of another chapter. After receiving an award for his novel “Tortilla Flat” and after writing “Of Mice and Men,” he began two years of journalistic field research of farm labor unions and migrant labor camps for Okies in California.

A decade later, Nabhan writes, it was in a farmworker camp in Visalia, California, that Reies López Tijerina “received an apocalyptic vision about agrarian land rights for migrant workers.”

Tijerina, the main subject of the subsequent chapter, changed the geography and object of his God-given dream to Rio Arriba County in northern New Mexico.

He knew the territory. Tijerina had been an itinerant preacher in northern Rio Arriba in the 1940s and early ’50s. He would now use his oratorical skills to fight a long-simmering social injustice — the theft of millions of acres of land grants owed Hispanics and Indigenous people under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The second part of that chapter focuses on longtime Albuquerque activist Arturo Sandoval. Nabhan writes that Sandoval had been attending meetings on the communal management of Mercedes land grants beginning when he was in high school, and was the only person from a racial or ethnic minority on the national organizing team for the first Earth Day.

Now more than 50 years after that celebration, Nabhan writes that Sandoval has “continued with his work as a pioneer in environmental justice, food justice and social justice to benefit New Mexicans, Mexicans and Indigenous people throughout the Southwest.” (Sandoval is a former Journal staff writer.)

The team of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta is cited in another chapter for unionizing farmworkers, but Nabhan said they were mentored by a man named Fred Ross, whom the author praised as the foremost grassroots organizer of the 20th century, including helping Blacks, Asians and Chicanos end school segregation in California.