Five centuries of creative resistance in the borderlands. A Q&A with Gary Paul Nabhan.

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by John Washington, AZ Luminaria
March 10, 2025

In 1533, Yaqui elders along the borderline of modern day Arizona and Sonora, responded to the first contact with Spanish colonialists — storming north through México on a slave drive — by deciding to “sing the Boundary” of their homelands. 

That was the Yaqui people’s attempts to quell the coming invasion. They also dressed in rattling gourds, donned white tail deer antlers on their heads, and danced to intimidate the Spaniards. 

Today, the border boundary between the United States and México is known less for its song than increasingly militarized attempts at pushback and exclusion. 

Yet, as Gary Paul Nabhan writes in his latest book, “Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance,” the spirit of Yaqui resistance has lived on in artists, organizers, mystics and songwriters. 

Nabhan, the author of dozens of books about the desert, desert plants, agave spirits and food, currently lives in Patagonia and has long been a fierce promoter of the borderlands’ rich artistic, culinary, and environmental history.

He is a first-generation Lebanese American and the co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH — a native seed collection and environmental advocacy organization — the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and will be presenting his latest book at the Tucson Festival of Books on Saturday, March 15, at 1 p.m.

In 14 chapters, each telling a tale of creative and sometimes mystical resistance — from the Yaquis in the early 16th century to the founders of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s — the book is his attempt “to help re-story and restore the spirit of communities and lands that have been neglected or undervalued as elements of the American experience.”

He writes about popular legends such as César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, as well as John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, but also early 17th century mystic and healer María de Ágreda, Mexican Robin Hood figure Joaquín Murríeta, and the founders of the Sanctuary Movement Jim Corbett, Ramón Dagoberto Quiñones, and John Fife.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. Dance, song, joy — maybe not elements readers would expect to find in a book about resistance. What is their role in combatting the conquest and erasure Indigenous groups and others have faced in this region?

A. I think we underestimate the impact of the arts in shaping social consciousness. Those Yaqui dancers met the Spanish slave traders doing what we’ve seen at Yaqui deer dances here in Tucson. It’s their way of saying, we’re still here, we’re defiantly here. Our music doesn’t sound like your music, but try to take it in.

Q. So many of the forms of resistance you describe are rooted in knowledge of the land and plants of the area. What role does the ecosystem itself play in standing up to the centuries of conquest, oppression, militarization?

A. That’s everything I’ve written about over the last 50 years and I sort of wanted to downplay that in this book because everyone thinks I’m just a seed and plant geek. I think the land back and seed back movements are rooted in querencia, or soulful sense of place. Indigenous and other people feel they’re in dialogue with the land or that they belong to the land, not that the land belongs to them. 

While some may see that as simplistic, saying I’m anti-property rights, to most Indigenous and even Hispanic people I work with, belonging to the land is fundamental to what they believe.

Q. What do you tell urbanites, or the many people today who are alienated from the land, or feel removed from the ecosystems they’re living in?

A. I’m obviously biased toward rural communities and the resistance movements that emerge from them, because of where I’ve lived half my life, but I’m also excited by urban resistance movements taking place in Philadelphia and elsewhere. These Black earth resistance movements of trying to stop bulldozing of vacant lots and undeveloped areas along rivers and saying, ‘That’s people’s land.’ Or the people’s park movement on the West Coast in the ’70s from San Diego all the way to Seattle.

People have found ways over the last two decades to develop agrarian movements inside urban zones.

Q. Given the threats — of climate change, hypersurveillance, arrest and deportation — many communities in the borderlands are facing today, how do you compare the present day to past periods of conflict and adversity? 

A. We see through the glass darkly. I always feel like I’m writing ephemera when I do something on current events. 

I talk to young activists about borders and some of them have never freaking heard of books like Convictions of the Heart. You know? So I think my bias as an old fart is to say, okay, I’m not going to win that war, but can I give them a solid foundation of people so far back that they’ll not gloss it over like they’ve glossed over stuff of the last 20 years. That’s an imperfect dance. I’m not saying it’s going to work, but I just wanted to say that these movements have precedence here that we need to learn from.

Q. If you were writing this book 20, 50, or 100 years from now, what figures or movements do you think you’d be writing about that are taking place today?

A. The land back movement all across the West that followed out of the Hispanic thing that Reies Tijerina was involved in and then met up with Native American land rights people. I think that’s super significant and its whole story is unfinished. Then some of my former students when Lori Coletta and I were up at NAU started the seed back movement. We brought together around 60 pounds of seed of something like 35 varieties. We did a repatriation of those seeds in Winslow, Arizona. And now a seed back movement parallel to the land back movement is beginning to happen in most western states. I think those are really, really healthy.

Q. How do you see resistance movements changing given today’s environment?

A. My big thing right now is that the sanctuary movement needs to be reimagined as something that finds sanctuary for half the freaking farm workers and food service workers in the United States. Over 1 million farm workers are undocumented, nearly half of the national farm workforce. When I first came to this county there wasn’t a damn ranch where people spoke English while they were working. The only good ranch hands and cowboys were Mexican and everyone took it for granted. Now that’s in peril. 

I think an answer to that is the Faith Lands movement that started about five years ago when conservation groups got together with churches, synagogues, mosques and Buddhist centers and said, Hey, you guys own about 170 million acres in the US. What are you going to do with that land and why aren’t you using it for social justice purposes?

Saying those are sacred lands belonging to faith-based communities that have always used them for religious purposes, well, right now we have to use them again for the religious purposes of protecting the poor and dispossessed. And if Christians think they can get away with ignoring that, they should go and fucking read the Sermon on the Mount again because they’re missing what Jesus was about.

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