Autobiography of Cotton

A novel about how cotton workers transformed the Mexico-US borderlands, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which became the basis of his landmark novel, Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas’s life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. Deeply personal and politically acute, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped develop. An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

Praise:

‘This book is one of restless movement and passionate hope.’ - Sam Sacks

‘A sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighbouring nations. In dense, lyrical prose, Rivera Garza weaves in an array of political and historical allusions, highlighting the human costs and environmental degradation caused by the cash crop that created our modern world.’ - Hamilton Cain

‘Cristina Rivera Garza — mythmaker, archivist, historiographer, etymologist, and philosopher — reveals the blood-soaked blossom between parallel histories. Rooted in careful research, Autobiography of Cotton is a triumph of the critical and speculative imagination.’ - Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

‘The Autobiography of Cotton provides a new and extraordinary signifier to the territory of the northern border of Mexico, that here raises up majestically upon the nomadic movement and the route of memories.’ - Yásnaya Elena Aguilar

‘Rivera Garza’s genre-bending work ultimately pays homage to the too-often invisible laborers who cultivate the land and build the cities on both sides of the border.’ - Lorinda Toledo

‘Autobiography of Cotton reclaims and reconstructs the political and ancestral mythologies that are perpetually refracted and distilled by the Mexico-US borderlands. Cristina Rivera Garza has become an oracle of the in-between, and one of North America’s greatest living writers.’ - Francisco Cantú