Autorentext
Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author, translator and critic, and the only two-time winner of the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2001; 2009). Originally written in Spanish, her works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of the PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. Her novel The Illiac Crest was published by And Other Stories in 2018. Upon US Publication in 2018, The Taiga Syndrome won the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award.

Klappentext

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.