In March 1934, a young Communist militant rode on horseback into the tiny settlement of Estación Camarón in Nuevo León, in the far northeast of Mexico. He had been sent by the party to support a strike by tenant cotton farmers, for the most part impoverished migrant families from further south. Though only nineteen years old, he had already served jail time for his activism, including a stint in the penal colony of the Islas Marías in 1932. His arrival in Camarón drew the attention of the local authorities and within a week he was arrested; he was then shuttled from one prison to another before being sent to the Islas Marías once more.
Though José Revueltas (1914–76) was still years away from becoming a celebrated novelist and Marxist intellectual, these experiences were clearly formative: his time in the Islas Marías would inspire his first published novel, Los muros de agua (The Walls of Water, 1941), while his fleeting visit to the far north supplied the setting and raw material for El luto humano (Human Mourning, 1943). Yet not only is there little documentation of Revueltas’s time in Camarón – some scattered notes and a brief letter to his mother – there are also few traces of the strike itself: some mentions in the Communist press, a stray flyer in government archives. It’s unclear whether the strikers won any of their demands. But for Revueltas’s cameo, the strike might have been yet another of the great anonymous silences in the record of popular struggle.
This lacuna is the point of departure for Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiography of Cotton (2026), which blends rich historical investigation and family memoir with novelistic reimagining. Rivera Garza’s paternal grandparents were also in Camarón in 1934, a coincidence that prompts her to ask:
Did José Revueltas and José María Rivera Doñez meet there, in Estación Camarón, on the whitish, caustic earth of the borderland, amidst the wind, shrubs and dwarf oaks? . . . Was my grandfather or grandmother one of those ‘severe, solemn’ faces that were still lodged in José Revueltas’s memory years later, when he was writing by hand – booklet after booklet, until nine were filled – . . . his second novel? I hope so. But there’s no way of knowing.
Born in the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas in 1964, Rivera Garza spent part of her childhood twenty miles to the southwest in the village of Anáhuac, where her grandparents had moved from Camarón in 1937. She trained in sociology at UNAM in Mexico City before switching to history, obtaining a PhD at the University of Houston, where she now runs the Spanish-language creative writing programme. Well known on both sides of the border, she has received many accolades in Mexico, but is perhaps best known in the Anglophone world for her Pulitzer Prize-winning Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2023). A powerful memoir of her younger sister, murdered in 1990 by an ex-boyfriend who has evaded justice, it is also, inescapably, a broader meditation on femicide in Mexico. The success of that book seems to have powered a surge of translations: in the past year alone, the novel Death Takes Me (2025) and a collection of short stories, Terrestrial (2026), have appeared, as well as Autobiography of Cotton (Autobiografía del algodón, 2020).
Since her first book of short stories, La guerra no importa (The War Doesn’t Matter, 1991), Rivera Garza has published across multiple genres, from poetry and novels to works of history, though several of her books are unclassifiable hybrids of fiction, criticism and memoir. For example, Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (There Was a Lot of Mist or Smoke or I Don’t Know What, 2016) is a critical engagement with the work of Juan Rulfo, but it also contains elements of travelogue and imaginative reconstruction – fictional extrapolations based on the historical record, akin to what African-American Studies scholar Saidiya Hartman has termed ‘critical fabulation’. Hartman’s aim was to address silences or gaps in the historical record – to write ‘with and against the archive’, as she put it in 2008. In Autobiography of Cotton, Rivera Garza adopts a comparable strategy in relation to a very different past, deploying a similar blend of genres as in her Rulfo book to recreate her family’s many migrations and locate them within the sweep of Mexico’s modern history. The result is, to my mind, a more compelling piece of writing than much of Rivera Garza’s fiction, which intentionally veers towards a certain abstruseness or opacity; in her hybrid works, by contrast, the counterpoint between different narrative modes has a propulsive effect, anchoring the fictional elements while unshackling the historical material. If Liliana’s Invincible Summer was intensely intimate, Autobiography is personal in a very different way. More than an act of reconstruction or recovery, it’s at once an attempt to give narrative embodiment to her forebears’ experiences and to reckon with the cycles of dispossession and migration that have shaped Mexico’s north.
The chronology of the book shifts back and forth with a dreamlike fluidity. The bulk of the narrative moves between the 1930s and the present day, reconstructing her grandparents’ arrival in Mexico’s northeastern corner and the new life they began there as cotton farmers, part of a grand project by the government of Lázaro Cárdenas to populate the frontier zone while distributing land. There are also earlier journeys Rivera Garza made to the north with her parents in the 1970s and as an adult in the 1980s, as well as passages taking us further back, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when her ancestors migrated northwards from the mines of San Luis Potosí to Coahuila. At one point Rivera Garza even drifts back to the 1600s, to the long indigenous resistance to Spanish colonization in the north-central highlands known as the Gran Chichimeca. This indigenous past is one of many submerged legacies she uncovers in the book: at some point during the course of his many migrations, her paternal grandfather, described as indigenous on his 1879 birth certificate, shed this label – a concrete example of how the silent conversion of indígenas into mestizos worked in practice, and a clear demonstration of the constructed, relational nature of indigenous identity in Mexico.
Stylistically, Autobiography is written in many modes, with many voices. Rivera Garza draws on a wealth of archival research – she reproduces several documents and telegrams – as well as engaging in densely imagined fictional interpolations; at other times the book is more essayistic or loosely meditative. A characteristic transition occurs when Rivera Garza describes the 1895 Oliver typewriter – ‘the bodywork of the first model was olive green and had large, white octagonal keys’ – on which one of the protagonists of Revueltas’s Human Mourning writes letters to the authorities; she then imagines the leader of the local agricultural workers’ union using a similar machine to type a letter denouncing Revueltas’s arrest in 1934.
The following Sunday, tearing his hair out after waiting over a week, Arnulfo sat down at the dreadful typewriter and, struggling to control a rage that scarcely allowed him to take a breath, typed a letter to the state governor. Onionskin paper. Black typewriter ribbon. The rebellious capitals jumping above or dropping below an imaginary line. And his index fingers hammering the keys.
Rivera Garza then reproduces the letter itself, the preceding imaginary scene leaking into our perceptions of the real document. This shuttling between the surviving historical records and fragmentary, fictionalized narratives gives the book an uncanny quality, at once insistently material and unmoored from empirical certainties. Not for nothing does Rivera Garza return repeatedly to Revueltas’s original title for Human Mourning, with its doubled sense of corporeal absence and ghostly presence: Las huellas habitadas, ‘the inhabited footprints’.
Revueltas himself haunts the text throughout – at once source material, protagonist, interlocutor and stylistic model. His autobiographical volume Las evocaciones requeridas (The Required Evocations, 1987), a posthumous compilation of memoirs, diaries and correspondence, contains a fragment he wrote in the 1930s about Sabinas Hidalgo, where he stopped on his way to Camarón:
The north is a whitish and wounding land. Plains and deserts still untamed: unfriendly, populated by bushes and dwarf oaks, by painful cacti that torture the flesh . . . The horizon echoes, pierced by the rays of a unpunished sun, red like a ball of fire. The earth cracks under horses’ hooves, dried-up and thirsty. The wind is a wild wind, unrelenting. Wind of the north. Ferocious Mexican wind, free, freest of all; it howls through the crevices in the wooden houses; it raises grey dust clouds; it shouts in the midst of the desolation of the anguished fields.
Rivera Garza opens Autobiography by summoning similar imagery, as if inhabiting Revueltas’s language while placing him within the scene; though her version of Revueltas is even more attentive to the organic life at his feet:
The sound of hooves beating on the sandy ground comes first. Then the breathing, strained and short-winded. Panting. A snort. The white ground splits to allow the emergence of twisted acacias, with their rounded crowns and roots embedded deeply in the earth, and the thorny branches of the mesquites, from which hang long, narrow pods and, now that it’s almost spring, these yellow flowers. The galloping doesn’t stop. Horseshoes dodge the spherical barrel cacti, whose burnished spiny tips appear here and there along the road. The white flowers of the anacahuita. The roadrunners. The worm lizards. Hadn’t he been told this was a desert?
Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa is another notable presence in the book. Anzaldúa grew up among sharecroppers and farm workers on the Texas side of the border, ‘rebellious, stubborn, queer’ as Rivera Garza puts it; she would famously develop a hybrid, in-between language to grapple with her plural heritage in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Many of Rivera Garza’s family members settled in the US – del otro lado, ‘on the other side’ – while others regularly moved back and forth. She is careful not to draw too direct a parallel between the forms of marginalization they experienced and those Anzaldúa was subjected to, but there is clearly a sense of kinship, rooted in the unforgiving landscape and its perils: Anzaldúa recognized the rattlesnake as her nahual or guardian animal; a bite from the same animal killed Rivera Garza’s grandmother.
But the ghosts that hover most troublingly over the book are from the very recent past: the uncounted casualties of Mexico’s ‘drug war’, which has desolated this corner of the country with particular ferocity. Rivera Garza notes the close overlap between the place-names of her narrative and those appearing repeatedly in news reports:
Anáhuac, La Gloria, Las Tortillas, Antiguo Guerrero, Ciudad Mier, Camargo, Reynosa, El Control, Anáhuac. For the inhabitants of twenty-first-century Mexico, those are the names of places destroyed by gunfire and then rapidly abandoned without so much as a final look back. There, they have uncovered – are still uncovering – mass graves in which so many bones, so many absences converge . . . It is hard to believe that, not so many years ago, the names of those towns evoked hope rather than terror.
Yet despite this stark contrast between past promise and contemporary atrocity, Rivera Garza nonetheless sees an underlying continuity between the 1930s and the present, arguing that there is a ‘relationship between the brief period of cotton plenitude and the gory war the Mexican state has waged against its citizens’. Monocropping of cotton brought soil erosion and agricultural crisis, only partially eased by a switch to sorghum; then came maquiladoras and trade liberalization under NAFTA, bringing at best a precarious exploitation to many. The disaster inflicted on rural Mexico sparked a new surge of northward migration. The drug war then assailed a region already laid waste; as Rivera Garza puts it: ‘When all this came to an end, when the terrestrial and human resources had run out, the region saw the imperious arrival of violence: now divested of all disguise, plain, simple, unadorned violence.’
The book’s final section is titled ‘Terricide’, underlining the notion of a long assault on the land. But who or what has been waging this war? At times Rivera Garza makes cotton itself the culprit – ‘atrocious cotton’, which ‘knows no compassion’, and which in different ways also devastated the US South. Elsewhere she points to human agents, including her family, unknowingly caught up in a wider battle in which cotton was simply an instrument: ‘We were at war . . . The name of that war was modernization.’ She herself, as she notes, is a product of that process of modernization: thanks to the relative stability her grandparents achieved, her parents were able to get an education, within a context – mid-twentieth-century Mexico – in which some degree of social mobility was still possible.
But the implied perpetrator of the terricide seems to be the Mexican state, responsible both for the Promethean project of cotton colonization in the 1930s and the militarized violence unleashed against its own citizens in the present. There are nuances, to be sure: for example, Rivera Garza includes a bravura portrait of Eduardo Chávez, the engineer who oversaw the irrigation project and allocation of lots from which her grandparents benefited. Indeed, the cardenista state appears in a positive light, as refracted through oral histories and the memories of the campesinos whose claims it heard and answered. But Rivera Garza tends elsewhere to frame the relationship between state and people as fundamentally antagonistic; whether in the present day or the historical past, the state appears as an agent of ‘dispossession and plunder’ whose attentions ordinary people have to evade or endure. At one point she even contends, in a somewhat puzzling aphorism, that ‘architecture is an invention of the state’, and then depicts her ancestors’ construction of makeshift, moveable shelters as a constantly interrupted search for autonomy.
The recurrently repressive character of the Mexican state, from Porfirian times through Tlatelolco to the drug war, can scarcely be doubted. But can the historical chain of developments in northern Mexico, from cotton farming to narco-violence, really be subsumed into a single campaign conducted by an unchanging state? Or are we dealing instead with a relentless concatenation of events unfolding within the same geographical space, but under fundamentally different structural conditions, driven by distinct material factors and disparate social and political actors? Rivera Garza herself evokes very clearly the contrast between the cardenista state and its later PRI successors, whether in its developmentalist guise or as technocratic implementer of neoliberalism. A materialist reckoning with the process of capitalist development in the region would surely need to take account of these and other moments of rupture, of cracks within the continuity Rivera Garza identifies.
This brings us to the major fracture that is strangely underplayed in Rivera Garza’s narrative, which is the US–Mexico border itself. Of course, most of the book is about the borderlands, and she reflects frequently on how her and her family’s lives have been formed by both the permeability and harsh solidity of that boundary. But what’s less apparent is the border’s role as a division marking a massive imbalance of power between two nation-states. Each contains its own very different socio-economic structures and political regimes, but it’s impossible to think of any part of Mexico’s modern history – from its territorial composition to its migration patterns, from its changing economic fortunes to its role as transit corridor for drugs – without factoring in the vast and decisive asymmetry between it and its northern neighbour. The other side – el otro lado – is in that sense not a separate place but an ever-present force, like gravity, always bending Mexico’s trajectory.
Rivera Garza will know more about these structural effects than most, having lived them at close quarters; in Autobiography she has preferred to focus on the human struggle for survival taking place under their weight. Yet the line on the map has inexorably shaped the conditions in which that struggle occurs, not only by demarcating zones of hugely uneven wealth and power, but by helping to create those disparities in the first place and then entrench them. Those differentials have repeatedly remade Mexican state and society – whether by setting the terms of the country’s integration into the world market; by reshaping its economy through ebbs and flows of investment; by supplying both the demand for drugs and the weapons that sustain the trade; or by putting clear limits on the state’s capacities to protect or provide for its citizens.
It is across the differentials made and sustained by the border that the long despoliation Rivera Garza describes has unfolded – not as the continuous project of a single state, but as successive iterations of capitalist development and dispossession, each bearing the imprint of a totalized, border-spanning system of inequalities. These patterns, too, haunt Autobiography of Cotton in more subtle ways. Before a combination of pests and market vulnerabilities put paid to northeastern Mexico’s cotton boom, Rivera Garza notes, the cultivar of Gossypium hirsutum most commonly grown in Tamaulipas was, aptly enough, named Empire.
Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Mexico in Flux’, NLR 147.