Nick Caistor, author of Mexico Inside Out, explores how Cristina Rivera Garza weaves a personal and political tapestry of Mexico in Autobiography of Cotton just published by And Other Stories.
By the 1930s, the years of turmoil and revolution in Mexico were largely over. The post-revolutionary government, keen to demonstrate the benefits of the new order, embarked on grandiose public works projects and the distribution of land to agricultural workers.
In the far north of the country, close to the Rio Bravo and the border with the United States, the Don Martín Dam was quickly built (too quickly as it turned out), and areas such as Irrigation System 4 were established to provide water to help produce a new cash crop, the ‘white gold’ of cotton.
Landless farmers, mineworkers and others flocked to the region, creating new towns such as Estación Camarón (the pink earth in the region reminding people of prawns) hoping to enjoy some stability and relief from grinding poverty.
However, as so often in the history of Mexico, this bright new beginning soon ran into difficulties. By 1934, the organised workers in the state of Nuevo Léon went on strike to try to increases wages, prices for their cotton, and better credit terms from government-backed banks. The Mexican Communist party, keen to support the strikers and hoping to push the revolution further towards socialism, sent the young writer José Revueltas from the capital to help organise the strike and if possible spread the movement elsewhere.
It is with the figure of Revueltas and his novel Human Mourning that he wrote based on his experiences in and around Estación Camaron, that the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza begins her Autobiography of Cotton.
Now in her sixties, Rivera Garza has produced a substantial body of work, from novels such as The Taiga Syndrome, also published by And Other Stories in 2019, and a moving memoir about how her sister was killed at the age of twenty by an ex-boyfriend, Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Living in Houston Texas and teaching at the university there, she has always been fascinated by the borderlands between the two countries and the mixture of cultures they give rise to.
However, in this intriguing book, part memoir, part fictionalised historical research and part philosophical enquiry, Rivera Garza has a very personal interest in the topic: she discovered that two of her grandparents, José María Rivera Doñez and Petra Peña Martínez were among the first migrants who went to Estación Camarón to plant cotton in the hope of a better future.
As she discovers, not only did the 1934 strike fail, but Estación Camarón and the cotton plantations were then hit by what seems like an almost biblical list of disasters: too much water in the shape of a flood, followed by a drought, and endless pests and diseases that destroy the cotton bolls. By 1937, eight hundred families from Estación Camarón, including her grandparents, decided to abandon the town and try their luck elsewhere, with just as little success. The town that could boast wide avenues and a main plaza with an obelisk in the centre was abandoned and soon fell into ruins.
Beyond La Frontera
For Rivera Garza, her grandparents’ experience of constantly having to move on raises urgent questions of identity and what it means to belong: “Belonging is the mechanism we use to make time palpable again . . . writing, which convenes the past, summons it, also invites us to be there,” she tells the reader.
As this quote shows, Rivera Garza’s eloquent book is much more than a family memoir. It also offers a social history of Mexico in the twentieth century, as well as philosophical debate about a sense of place and what we inherit from our ancestors.
In the twenty-first century, Rivera Garza finds the region submerged in a different kind of violence – what has become known as the authorities’ War on Drugs. This means that travelling by road with a female companion to try to find what remains of Estación Camarón she is constantly fearful. And in her last visit to discover what remains of Estación Camarón, in 2017, she is horrified to find that what little remains of what was once a thriving town is being reduced to rubble, as the area has been chosen for massive fracking projects: the land yet again becoming a source of conflict, generating profits only for the few.
Christina Macsweeney’s translation copes apparently effortlessly (if translation can ever be effortless) with the different registers and concerns of the original, from the tender portrayals of the author’s ancestors and atmospheric descriptions of the arid countryside of Mexico’s far north, to references to philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou.
Reviewed by Nick Caistor for BookBlast
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