Writing Is a Community Practice: A Guest Post by Cristina Rivera Garza
With in-depth research blended with a personal narrative, Cristina Rivera Garza crafts a well-informed novel in this fictionalized history of agricultural colonization and labor activism. Read on for an exclusive essay from Cristina on writing The Autobiography of Cotton.
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Autobiography of Cotton: A Novel
Autobiography of Cotton: A Novel
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Paperback
$12.75
$17.00
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.
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.
Autobiography of Cotton explores the making of the US-Mexico border from the point of view of cotton and my migrating parents, who arrived in Matamoros, Tamaulipas during the early 1930s. An indigenous couple from San Luis Potosi, my paternal grandparents left a drought-infested region and walked up to the coal mining areas of Coahuila, moving east as they followed rumors of land distribution. My maternal grandparents crossed the US-Mexico border when they were children, working as farmhands picking cotton most of their lives. Leftist president Lázaro Cárdenas and engineer Eduardo Chávez conceived of a cotton experiment that would reinforce the frontier, receive Mexicans deported by the anti-immigration policies issued by President Hoover, and develop agriculture in an otherwise brittle land, which radically altered my grandparents lives and the territories they helped clear out.
I completed this book during the first presidency of Donald Trump, when migrant families were being ripped apart and children put in cages. While official accounts spoke of immigration as a “problem” or a recent phenomenon, I wrote of migration as a long-lasting cycle of extractivism and hope that involved economics and climate as well as everyday stories of courage and resilience. It was a highly personal undertaking involving capturing a family tale without eschewing the larger forces at play.
This book is based on five years of archival and field research. I traveled with family members and friends to regions that have become sites of the so-called “war on drugs,” taking notes and interviewing people along the way. Writing is a community practice. We don’t write alone or by ourselves. Writers borrow language, which belongs to the many and comes to us embedded with history and conflict. We try to arrange and return these stories to their rightful owners. Writing is concentrated attention.