A fusion of fiction and nonfiction that excavates both national and family history. On a broad and somewhat scholarly level, Autobiography of Cotton details Mexico’s postindependence labor movements and land reforms ... Gripping ... This book is one of restless movement and passionate hope.
Eloquent and beautifully written ... Though Rivera Garza takes liberties with details of the events, her decision to fill out the narrative with the thoughts and emotions of the characters feels authentic. Her astute observations threaded throughout also render it a sociological critique.
It’s only through understanding the historical cycles that shaped her past that Rivera Garza can make sense of the fears and longings that haunt her present. In Autobiography of Cotton, she lays out a method for the rest of us to undertake the same excavation.
...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 ... 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.
