AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF COTTON

An author in search of a history that’s been all but erased.

Rivera Garza’s latest book to be translated into English begins with an exhausted man on horseback racing to the “transit point” of Estación Camarón in northern Mexico. His name is José Revueltas, and the Mexican Communist Party has sent him to the settlement, near the country’s Irrigation System No. 4, where the community’s cotton workers have gone on strike. Revueltas, an author and activist, really existed, and he wrote about the strike in his novel Human Mourning (1943). There’s also a real-life couple in Rivera Garza’s novel: Estación Camarón laborers José María Rivera Doñez and Petra Peña Martinez, whose son, Antonio Rivera Peña, is Rivera Garza’s father. The author’s grandparents and Revueltas were both at Irrigation System No. 4 around the same time, but Rivera Garza doesn’t know if they ever met, which is in large part because the history of the region—and the town itself—have been erased: “We can’t go to Estación Camarón because Estación Camarón doesn’t exist,” Rivera Garza writes, “but we go there anyhow.” This book functions as an account of that journey, in which she tries to discover the real stories of her ancestors, which results in frequent frustration: “I have never felt the passage of time to be a punishment as strongly as in the towns cotton has passed through, with its trail of protests against the exploitation and inequality resulting from its cultivation.” This remarkable book is billed as a novel but resists classification; it blends biography, history, literary and ecological criticism, and, crucially, memoir. Rivera Garza beautifully asks vital questions about whose stories get to be preserved: “Belonging is the mechanism we use to make time palpable again,” she writes. “Writing, which convenes the past, summons it, also invites us to be there.” This is undeniably a major accomplishment.

A masterful blend of genres from a shining light of Mexican literature.