Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza • Book Reviews

Fiction by Cristina Rivera Garza translated by Christina MacSweeney, reviewed by Dylan Cook
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF COTTON (Graywolf Press)

Years ago, my grandmother showed me a dried out twig studded with fluffy, white bolls of cotton. She explained how she used to harvest it when she was just a girl living in a Texas border town. She explained how her child-sized hands were well-suited to pluck the nested cotton bolls, how these bolls were guarded by a dense network of thorns, and how she used to rub her hands with dirt to clot her inevitable cuts. Despite my best efforts to understand these stories, the world of my grandmother’s childhood always felt unusually remote. It seemed like a bygone era whose cruelties, like cotton’s thorns, were too sharp to touch.

It’s this distant, unknown world that Cristina Rivera Garza stunningly brings to life in Autobiography of Cotton. Rivera Garza, like me, has skin in the game: her family also lived on both sides of the US-Mexico border at a time when it was little more than a symbolic line in the dirt. Fictionalized portraits of her family members live alongside archival research, historical narrative, telegrams, and Rivera Garza’s own autobiographical asides. Autobiography of Cotton, Rivera Garza’s seventh novel, is the latest entry in an oeuvre that consistently mingles fact and fiction to delightfully dizzying effects. This experimentation has often garnered her work the “genre bending” label, but perhaps it’s time to consider that she’s charting a genre all her own.

The novel begins simply enough: José Revueltas, a young go-getter from the Mexican Communist Party, travels to Estación Camarón in 1934. A strike has broken out there. Seven years prior, the government constructed the Don Martín Dam and parcelled out the newly arable land. In exchange for the land, farmers must grow the “white gold” that is cotton and pass the profits back up the chain. By the onset of the strike, the physical and emotional cost of farming cotton far outweighed the paltry wages handed down. Revueltas came in admiration of the strikers, offering himself to their cause in spite of their resistance to him. In their minds, “[w]hat’s a kid from the capital going to know about what we do or don’t do around here?”

With a deft sleight of hand, Rivera Garza answers this question for us. She puts her novelistic pen down and talks to us directly: “had [Revueltas] not ridden to Estación Camarón, attracted by the rumor of the radical mobilization of the farmworkers, nothing would now be known of the strike that was put down at the beginning of April 1934.” Nearly a decade after the start of the strike, Revueltas gave voice to the strikers when he published Human Mourning (a fine novel in its own right, though it’s unfortunately out of print). Beyond Human Mourning, almost no evidence exists of the several thousands of farmworkers—even the number is uncertain—who fought for their rights in Estación Camarón. This includes José María Rivera Doñez and Petra Peña Martínez, Rivera Garza’s grandparents.

In some ways, the novel begins here, near its chronological end, with Rivera Garza looking back on the lives her grandparents lived. She rejected the idea that nothing could be known about a strike so large its ripples were subtly felt across Mexican and American farmlands. She decided to go to the source—to the place where Estación Camarón used to be. “I have never felt the passage of time to be a punishment as strongly as in the towns cotton has passed through,” she writes. She finds an apocalyptically desolate town whose few inhabitants know nothing of the strike. Throughout her research, Rivera Garza can find government documents recording cotton harvests and profits, but nothing about the strike that disrupted their production. Of her own family, Rivera Garza finds thin records that can situate a name in a place and time, but nothing that lends richness to the lives behind those names. For the rest, she must become, “the detective of [her] own memory.”

Anyone who has tried their hand at genealogy has likely encountered similar dead ends. The stories of our family elders peter out into a list of dates and names. Rivera Garza voices her frustrations with the scant evidence she has to work from, writing:

[M]y family never sat down at the table, as if around a microphone, with the express intention of talking about their history with cotton. In fact, few of them have believed their story would be relevant enough to justify the existence of a conversation, let alone a book. Little or nothing of what we have shared about cotton was recorded or explicitly thought of as a material for the eyes of others—neither as a foundational legacy, a well-structured source of pride, nor a series of sentimental lessons for the future.

Heroically, Rivera Garza does not let this stop her. In the absence of direct evidence, she animates the lives of her family members by imagining them swept up in the cultural current of their time. What is factually true then becomes less important than what could be true, and José María Rivera Doñez and Petra Peña Martínez become our hero and heroine. Rivera Garza traces the arcs of their lives, embellishing the highs and lows with poignant clarity. Together, they raise children, lose children, and ceaselessly pursue what is best for them. It is that pursuit that brings them to Estación Camarón, and when its promise wears out, what drives them on and on and on. At one stop, in Tamaulipas, they wonder:

Despair made plans spring up at every moment […] If they went back to Zaragoza, they would just be the same old farm laborers, the same peons, and so would their children. On the other hand, if there was a chance, however slim, of owning a piece of land, they could offer the kids who followed them everywhere something different.

Perhaps this conversation between husband and wife never happened, but does it matter? Through her own mythmaking, Rivera Garza affirms the role that fiction has in establishing truths as they loom in the cultural imagination. After all, what do we remember of the Dust Bowl outside of The Grapes of Wrath? What of the Jazz Age beyond The Great Gatsby?

Now, Autobiography of Cotton epitomizes an era that is harder to pin down and, arguably, never ended. It was an era of fluid borders and people who criss-crossed them to give more to their children. These migrant souls loved deeply and lost bitterly as they shifted the earth beneath their feet. Thanks to Rivera Garza, I can finally understand the world my grandmother inherited—a place not full of thorns, but bound together by a familial love that knew no boundaries.

Autobiography of Cotton was released by Graywolf Press on February 3, 2026.

Dylan Cook is a genetics graduate student based in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found at concerts, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].