Autobiography of Cotton

In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which would later serve as the foundation for his landmark novel, Human Mourning. In her groundbreaking novel Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields. Her narrative intersects with Revueltas’s life and offers a vivid and evocative account of the history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-U.S. border.

Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza explores how cotton transformed the borderlands by recounting the story of the cotton workers’ strike. She reveals how cycles of deprivation and environmental destruction continue to affect generations. Rivera Garza skillfully creates a new kind of border novel that illustrates how a fragile landscape drastically changed her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped to develop. In this intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton offers a rich social history that encompasses agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

I recommend “Autobiography of Cotton,” but readers should be patient as the book shifts back and forth in time. Everything becomes clear as you continue reading.

Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the University of Houston’s PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish.

Christina MacSweeney is the award-winning literary translator of works by Julián Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and Elvira Navarro. She received the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci‘s The Company.

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