In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón. 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.
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.
