Autobiography of Cotton: A Novel [Paperback]

In 1934, a young Jos? Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers strike in Estaci?n Camar?n, 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 Revueltass 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 Cottonreveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prizewinning author ofLilianas Invincible Summer. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the University of Houstons PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish.

Christina MacSweeney is the award-winning literary translator of works by Juli?n Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and Elvira Navarro. She received the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Ver?nica Gerber BiceccisThe Company.

This book is one of restless movement and passionate hope.Sam Sacks,Wall Street Journal

A sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighborilÓÏ