Cristina Rivera Garza
Autobiography of Cotton
A novel about how cotton workers transformed the Mexico-US borderlands, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.
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.
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 Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.
About the Book
- Read this thoughtful interview with Rivera Garza, predominantly centred around her Pulitzer-prize winning Liliana’s Invincible Summer.
- Investigate the two prior Rivera Garza novels we’ve published: The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest.
- Watch Rivera Garza give a small but mighty masterclass on writing.
Author: Cristina Rivera Garza
Original language: Spanish
Format: B-format Paperback
Publication date: 5 May 2026
ISBN: 9781916751637
Ebook ISBN: 9781916751644
Number of pages: 288
Reviews
Sam Sacks
Wall Street Journal
‘This book is one of restless movement and passionate hope.’
Hamilton Cain
Time
‘A sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighbouring nations. In dense, lyrical prose, Rivera Garza weaves in an array of political and historical allusions, highlighting the human costs and environmental degradation caused by the cash crop that created our modern world.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘An impassioned testament to resilience and struggle. It’s not to be missed.’
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
‘Cristina Rivera Garza — mythmaker, archivist, historiographer, etymologist, and philosopher — reveals the blood-soaked blossom between parallel histories. Rooted in careful research, Autobiography of Cotton is a triumph of the critical and speculative imagination.’
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar
‘The Autobiography of Cotton provides a new and extraordinary signifier to the territory of the northern border of Mexico, that here raises up majestically upon the nomadic movement and the route of memories.’
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘A masterful blend of genres from a shining light of Mexican literature.’
Literary Hub
‘A historical novel braided with deep personal narrative and research, creating something unique and almost indefinable.’
Lorinda Toledo
Los Angeles Times
‘Rivera Garza’s genre-bending work ultimately pays homage to the too-often invisible laborers who cultivate the land and build the cities on both sides of the border.’
Tobias Carroll
Inside Hook
‘An enlightening glimpse into histories both familial and national.’
Francisco Cantú
‘Autobiography of Cotton reclaims and reconstructs the political and ancestral mythologies that are perpetually refracted and distilled by the Mexico-US borderlands. Cristina Rivera Garza has become an oracle of the in-between, and one of North America’s greatest living writers.’
