Quote of the Week

I don't use drugs myself. I was too straight to try them in high school, and by the time I moved into a co-op in college where housemates displayed their bongs on their windowsills, I suffered delusions of running for political office someday. (That's the Clinton administration for you.) A cousin had also succumbed to addiction, and I'd seen the toll it had taken on her family. What truly turned me off drugs, however, was dating a Colombian whose parents paid hefty bribes to dissuade cartels from turning their coffee plantation into a coca farm. After traveling to southern Colombia with him and witnessing the destruction that U.S. drug use had wreaked on a more global scale, I became one of those vitriolic Chicanas who, if offered a joint, will snap, "Sorry, I don't smoke the ashes of my people."
--Stephanie Elizondo Griest, All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

Quote of the Week

Protesting assumptions is futile in the borderlands. Appearance alone determines whether your citizenry is questioned and allegiances tested on a back road far from earshot. For much of my life, I wallowed in guilt over the privilege my light skin and blue eyes have granted me, but I've come to recognize the vanity of this emotion. Guilt does not free anyone from a detention center or equip a home with a septic tank. The only proper response to privilege is to grip it like a baseball bat and shatter injustice with all of your might.
--Stephanie Elizondo Griest, All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

Book of the Week

I have long enjoyed the writing of Stephanie Elizondo Griest but I would like to think that her latest book -- All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands -- is her best book yet -- perhaps because it was so ambitious but more likely because it was so angry. I found it hard to read the book without finding at least one item to be angry about -- and no, I'm not talking about bad grammar or misspelled words, I'm talking about the events Ms. Griest described in the book when writing during her various visits to the Mexican and Canadian border country. She wrote about a lot of things worth getting angry about -- ethnic discrimination, environmental racism, illegal drugs, unsolved murders, and so forth. As you might guess, she also wrote quite a bit about illegal immigration but even there she had a different take on the issue than most Hispanic apologists. As you might guess, she was not overly fond of our current president but she also didn't pretend that all the problems on our southern border began on January 20, 2017.

My biggest problem with the book is that it made me want to hulk out and hit somebody -- preferably one of the many people responsible for the problems she described in her book. And as you might guess, that's not exactly a very productive strategy.

However, the book did teach me a lot I didn't know about the Mexican and Canadian borders. And the parallels Ms. Griest drew between the two borders I found most fascinating. In any event, knowing about a problem is all too often the first step in solving it.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Stephanie Elizondo Griest!

Born June 6, 1974.

She is a young Mexican-American writer from South Texas whose books include the 2004 book Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and the 2008 book Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines. She is one of the few travel writers I have ever read who is also of Mexican descent. Then again she also won the 2007 Richard Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting for her writing about Mexico so she is not exactly just another travel writer.

Like yours truly, she can be also described as a Latin half-and-half since only one side of her family is of Mexican descent. However, the same thing can be said about a lot of Mexican-Americans nowadays.

She is also one of my favorite writers and I'm sorry that she has not written more books.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Stephanie Elizondo Griest!

Born June 6, 1974.

She is a young Mexican-American writer from South Texas whose books include the 2004 book Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and the 2008 book Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines. She is one of the few travel writers I have ever read who is also of Mexican descent. Then again she also won the 2007 Richard Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting for her writing about Mexico so she is not exactly just another travel writer.

Like yours truly, she can be also described as a Latin half-and-half since only one side of her family is of Mexican descent. However, the same thing can be said about a lot of Mexican-Americans nowadays.

Book of the Week (Libro de la Semana)




I just started reading Stephanie Elizondo Griest's 2008 book Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines this week and so far it is pretty good. Of course, the plot -- a young American woman of bicultural descent decides to travel to Mexico, the land of her maternal ancestors, in order to get in touch with her roots -- seems almost tailor-made for a Hispanic half and half like me, but we'll see.

I am curious about the author's previous book, Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana. Perhaps I'll feature that in a future post.