All the Agents and Saints
All the Agents and Saints

Author: Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1469631601

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After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation's foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. The frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence, before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York / Canada borderlands. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between and the people who live there.

Mexican Enough
Mexican Enough

Author: Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-08-05

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1416579710

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Growing up in a half-white, half-brown town and family in South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest struggled with her cultural identity. Upon turning thirty, she ventured to her mother's native Mexico to do some root-searching and stumbled upon a social movement that shook the nation to its core. Mexican Enough chronicles her adventures rumbling with luchadores (professional wrestlers), marching with rebel teachers in Oaxaca, investigating the murder of a prominent gay activist, and sneaking into a prison to meet with indigenous resistance fighters. She also visits families of the undocumented workers she befriended back home. Travel mates include a Polish thief, a Border Patrol agent, and a sultry dominatrix. Part memoir, part journalistic reportage, Mexican Enough illuminates how we cast off our identity in our youth, only to strive to find it again as adults -- and the lessons to be learned along the way.

Special Agents of Christ
Special Agents of Christ

Author: Annalisa Boyd

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 9781936270552

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You're never too young to be one of God's "special agents"--the people He uses to accomplish His will in the world. In this prayer book written especially for middle-grade children, the author of the popular teen prayer book Hear Me uses the examples of special agents of the past--the saints--to encourage children to serve God here and now. In addition to morning and evening prayers, prayers for special needs, and psalms to pray, Special Agents of Christ includes "training drills" on preparing for confession, understanding the Liturgy and the clergy's vestments, and more.

All the Sinners, Saints
All the Sinners, Saints

Author: Ron Jacobs

Publisher:

Published: 2013-04

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781937677398

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A young draftee named Victor Willard goes AWOL in Germany after an altercation with a commanding officer. Porgy is an African-American GI involved with the international Black Panthers and German radicals. Victor and a female radical named Ana fall in love. They move into Ana's room in a squatted building near the US base in Frankfurt. The international campaign to free Black revolutionary Angela Davis is coming to Frankfurt. Porgy and Ana are key organizers and Victor spends his days and nights selling and smoking hashish, while becoming addicted to heroin. Police and narcotics agents are keeping tabs on them all. Politics, love, and drugs. Truths, lies, and rock and roll. All the Sinners, Saints is a story of people seeking redemption in a world awash in sin. This is the third novel in the Seventies series by Jacobs, and is a prequel to Short Order Frame Up (ISBN- 9780977459094) and Co-Conspirator's Tale (ISBN- 9780983206309).

On the Plain of Snakes
On the Plain of Snakes

Author: Paul Theroux

Publisher: Mariner Books

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 0544866479

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Legendary travel writer Theroux drives the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines.

All the Crooked Saints
All the Crooked Saints

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0545930820

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From bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater, a gripping tale of darkness, miracles, and family. Here is a thing everyone wants: A miracle.Here is a thing everyone fears:What it takes to get one.Any visitor to Bicho Raro, Colorado, is likely to find a landscape of dark saints, forbidden love, scientific dreams, miracle-mad owls, estranged affections, one or two orphans, and a sky full of watchful desert stars. At the heart of this place you will find the Soria family, who all have the ability to perform unusual miracles. And at the heart of this family are three cousins longing to change its future: Beatriz, the girl without feelings, who wants only to be free to examine her thoughts; Daniel, the Saint of Bicho Raro, who performs miracles for everyone but himself; and Joaquin, who spends his nights running a renegade radio station under the name Diablo Diablo. They are all looking for a miracle. But the miracles of Bicho Raro are never quite what you expect.

Around the Bloc
Around the Bloc

Author: Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Publisher: Villard

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0307414612

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Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.” In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who narrowly avoided radiation cleanup duties at Chernobyl, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists, and comes to difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy. is the absorbing story of a young journalist driven by a desire to witness the effects of Communism. Along the way, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner-party vodka (one bottle per guest, plus an extra), stumbles upon Beijing’s underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elián González’s return to Cuba, and gains a new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.

Saints Under Siege
Saints Under Siege

Author: Stuart A. Wright

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011-10

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0814795293

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In April 2008, state police and child protection authorities raided Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, a community of 800 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a polygamist branch of the Mormons. State officials claimed that the raid, which was triggered by anonymous phone calls from an underage girl to a domestic violence hotline, was based on evidence of widespread child sexual abuse. In a high-risk paramilitary operation, 439 children were removed from the custody of their parents and held until the Third Court of Appeals found that the state had overreached. Not only did the state fail to corroborate the authenticity of the hoax calls, but evidence reveals that Texas officials had targeted the FLDS from the outset, planning and preparing for a confrontation. Saints under Siege provides a thorough, theoretically grounded critical examination of the Texas state raid on the FLDS while situating this event in a broader sociological context. The volume considers the raid as an exemplar case of a larger pattern of state actions against minority religions, offering comparative analyses to other government raids both historically and across cultures. In its look beyond the Texas raid, it provides compelling evidence of social intolerance and state repression of unpopular minority faiths in general, and the FLDS in particular.

Least of All Saints
Least of All Saints

Author: Robert Bahr

Publisher: Dissertation.com

Published: 2000-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780595152896

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A fascinating woman…a charismatic religious leader! Aimee Semple McPherson captured the imagination of an entire nation, entertained celebrities and royalty, became one of the most powerful and influential women in American history. Founder of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, known around the world for her Sunday night radio broadcasts and mammoth crusades, she suddenly disappeared with her married radio station manager.

We the Dead
We the Dead

Author: Brian Michael Murphy

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-05-16

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1469668300

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Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.