Autobiography of Cotton

Memoirist and novelist Rivera Garza (Death Takes Me) weaves labor history, environmental catastrophe, and stories of her family into a vivid tapestry. Much of the work is shaped around the author's reflections on José Revueltas's 1943 novel Human Mourning, which chronicles a 1930s Mexican cotton workers' strike. Rivera Garza uses the text as a way into the lives of her paternal grandparents, José María Rivera Doñez and Petra Peña Martínez, cotton workers on the border between Mexico and the U.S., where agricultural production and novel irrigation techniques were eventually stymied by exploitative industrialization and government disregard. Intriguingly, she speculates on whether Revueltas met her grandparents when he was doing political work in the region as a member of the Communist Party ("Was my grandfather or grandmother one of those 'severe, solemn' faces that were still lodged in José Revueltas's memory years later?"). In present-day passages, Rivera Garza travels to the sites that also appear in Revueltas's novel, "towns cotton has passed through, with its trail of protests... and inequality resulting from its cultivation." Throughout, she wonders how best to approach an unknowable past as a fiction writer, searching for a "way to honor those lives... without making them... a story shared without permission." Her solution, which she achieves with this hybrid novel, offers an impassioned testament to resilience and struggle. It's not to be missed. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)