In Autobiography of Cotton Cristina Rivera Garza traces the footprints of her grandparents and thousands of other nomadic families who worked harvesting cotton on the northeastern border between Mexico and the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This novel-archive tells the history of how the destructive production of cotton attempted to overcome the aridity of the desert and transformed the lives of so many. This novel is also an autofictional essay that tells how large-scale extractivism exploited the land to pave the way for the violence that rules the border today. The book maps the history of the territory with material writing practices of authorial disappropiation such as using images, archival documents, and the texts of other authors. Analogous to the territories she writes about, Rivera Garza´s novel is a space made up of different layers of texts and images.
Autobiography of Cotton makes me wonder, what are the author´s material writing practices and how do they form a space for reflecting on territories beyond archival silences? In what ways do these material writing strategies address violence and why is it important to reflect on the environmental origin of political violence in the face of our present? For both the materiality of the territory in the book and the geographical territory the novel writes about, I understand territory as a dynamic construction of material and symbolic shared practices of living. This notion of territory is in line with Arturo Escobar un Thinking-feeling with the Earth.1
The book is a novel-archive that unearths the violence and silencing of cotton extraction in the border between Mexico and the United States in the Contemporary era. The text contains different material strategies to reflect beyond the dispossession that large-scale extractivism causes and imagine other kindships understood as interspecies alliances (Haraway 2016).2 Rather, the novel centers around women and plants as agents, includes visual experiments that use cotton prints and constructs critical fabulations (Saidiya Hartman 2008).3 The material-textual strategies I will explore are anchored in Garza’s broader writing corpus, which systematically uses material writing practices that counters extractivist premises as property or possession.
In the last 15 years, Rivera Garza has cultivated an “open process” writing style. In her novel-archives There was a lot of Fog, or Smoke, or I am not sure what (2016), Autobiography of Cotton (2020) and Liliana´s Invincible Summer (2021) she incorporates images and archival documents from personal and official sources into narrations that blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The books include travel stories of the narrator´s journeys in the same territories of her book´s characters with whom she shares different types of kinships. Using fiction as a tapestry, Rivera Garza creates a hospitable structure that stitches together different types of materials. These works are open in the sense that their material process of creation becomes part of the plots of the stories they tell. Also, their open process writing style means that they involve the readers in the research they advance with questions and documents. This emphasis is also present in her books of essay and criticism, The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (2013), Grieving (2011) and Geological Writings (2022), where Rivera Garza reflects on what it means to write surrounded by the dead. Or, what the relationship between writing and death implies for Contemporary writers, in contexts of political violence such as the Mexican-US ones.
The practices of material writing that Rivera Garza enacts in the novel overflow the limits of the archive by disappropriating, or taking from, the “private” property of individual authors and documental pieces and reusing them. This builds parallelims with the The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation,4 where Rivera Garza defines disappropiation as a poetics that seeks to “divest oneself of the domain of one´s own”5, and at the same time recognize “a mutual interdependence from language”6. These material practices of writing are dialogic and construct works from a plurality of voices. In other words, reading becomes an engine of the text, a meeting space between authors and readers. This process of rewriting the author promotes alternative political relations to capitalism and private property in the contexts of the literary system, the figure of the author and the market.
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The Dwelled Footprints and the Silences of the Archives
Rivera Garza retraces the steps of Mexican intellectual José Revueltas (1914-1976) in the first chapter of Autobiography of Cotton and narrates his travel to the northeastern Mexican border. In 1934 Revueltas goes from the capital to the cotton fields in the desert to register a strike in the Irrigation District 4, which lies on the northeastern Mexican border. Rivera Garza narrates Revueltas´s reaction when he sees the white gold and meets the nomad workers who populate the narrator´s family memories. Revueltas witnesses how the desert itself has been moved from its place and the landscape has transformed into cotton fields. He attends assembly meetings, listens to the workers´ petitions for land, and walks the fields. His reaction stems from a desire to preserve this history from oblivion and denial: he sits down to write.
Years later, Revueltas publishes a novel first called The Dwelled Footprints and then The Human Grief (1934). A few days after being in the town Estación Camarón, Revueltas is imprisoned by the Mexican government for supporting the strike, and spends the following years being sent from one prison to another, including Las Islas Marías, the maximum security prison of the time. Revuelta´s presence in the cotton fields leads a vestige of the strike in the form of telegraph messages:
Through the use of telegrams and other documents to blend personal and official history, Rivera compels the question, why are the most important uprisings in the northern region of Mexico in modern and contemporary times unknown? The novel itself is the response that addresses the archival silences of the official historical record: it makes visible the scattered information on the strike, the lives of the cotton workers, the elusive ways in which the archives speak of those affected, and the absence of their accounts in the collective imagination. The archival silences the novel points out are produced by a specific type of environmental violence: large-scale extractivism.
The novel identifies the environmental root of the political consequences of the confrontation of two different development models related to cotton extractivism. The first is a national agricultural development model imposed from Mexico’s capital amidst the ambivalences of state abandonment. And the second is a destructive neoliberal and transnational production model that has come to dominate modern trade agreements, as evidenced in the 1994 Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which seals the abandonment of agriculture as a Mexican national project. As the novel describes, this second model opens the way to different cycles of “destructive production” which include the cotton monoculture, the construction of dams and dykes, fracking, maquilas, and the drug wars that are lived today in the violence along the United States and Mexico border territory.
In other words, a narrative line of the novel is the history of a terracide, which Rivera Garza defines as a damage to the land for profit. This “murder of the land” is also a destruction of the different ways of life and the political kindships that constitute the territory. As the novel points out: “Gastón Gordillo says that ghost towns are destroyed sites not because they are physically shattered, but because the social relations that gave them life have been dissolved”.8
The silencing and disappearance of a collective memory at the border, a double denial of the people and their ways of living in that space the strikers defended, is another kind of oppression to the strikers and their legacy. This punishment is a double ruin, personal and national, as Rivera Garza points out: “The double denial of ruin is the most radical destruction that a place can suffer, says anthropologist Gastón Gordillo. Ruination. Ruin. Nation. Swimming nation. Ruin. Na”.9
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The Novel as a Form of Alternative Geo-Archive
The inclusion of documents such as photos, civil records, diaries and letters is one of the main material strategies Rivera Garza uses to write this novel. The book is a new archive made up of documents, the narrators’ memories of the cotton fields, and research in Mexican and US libraries and interviews. It also includes the history of the grandparents and great-grandparents of the author from both sides of the family, who lived on either sides of the border. Rivera Garza also includes quotes from other books and analyses as layers of the narrative. Autobiography of Cotton is an alternative archive in the sense that it tells counter-stories.
In tune with Sayida Hartman´s critical fabulation in Venus in Two Acts, I think this book is a “a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive”.10 Critical fabulation narrates counter-histories as a form of symbolic compensation in the present for the loss of lives due to violence in the past. Inserting these agencies from the past and reflecting on them in the present allows us to include them in the political communities. Counter-histories explore the subjective, or “a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes and possibilities”.11 The subjective is a vital mode of engagement that allows us to articulate new possibilities in the face of archival silences.
Hartman also asks, “is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?”12 I believe that the most radical contribution of Rivera Garza´s novel is in the way it expands the limits of the archive by introducing new agents of history: women and plants. In the double gesture of telling the cultural histories of the silenced agencies of women and plants, Garza recognizes the difficulties of representing these lives in a narrative form, as the daily lives of women and their work inside and outside the house are rarely the subject of history.
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Women, Plants and Plantation
One of Garza’s writing practices to make these cultural histories visible is to configure the text as a space or a territory of recognition in which the bodies of plants and women appear and their histories are told. The narrative depicts daily life in the plantations and the territories that appear in the novel from the perspectives of the I and the we. The first person singular is the autofictional “I” the narrator builds, and the first person plural is the community of nomadic grandparents and inhabitants of the border territories, in particular the lives of women and cotton plants. The “I” that is implied in the word autobiography, the title of the novel, is actually a “we”. That is to say: the author narrates the ways of life that made possible and shaped her own life.
An example of making women´s lives visible is how Rivera Garza includes in the book the history of Regina, the narrator´s grandmother, who becomes a combatant in the Mexican Revolution. The novel dwells on her participation in the frontlines of the armed conflict, as well as her love stories, struggles and sickness. Beyond this case, the novel recognizes other political roles of women in the daily and affective lives of their families as caregivers and makes visible their work in the plantations. The harvest of cotton has the particularity that many of its labors have been carried out by women: picking, threshing, removing the straw, and clearing. They make mattresses and cotton sheets. By these gestures of turning the text into a material territory that recognizes bodies that have been silenced, the writing unearths ghosts and recognizes its political agency.
To recognize the agency of plants, Rivera Garza describes the cotton fields and investigates the species gossypium hirustum. She describes how Revueltas feels watched by millions of eyes as he walks through the plantation. And he uses images and montages in which he makes stamps and risographs with the cotton blossoms. She also composes images that superimpose layers of the present and the past of the territories she writes about, showing the palimpsest condition of the territories and photographs the novel investigates. With a variety of artistic means, the author presents the bodies of the plants and their opacity, in the sense that they have non-human languages and agencies.
The presence of the bodies of plants and women allows us to reflect on how we can recognize them and what they mean for our present. The silent presence of cotton in the narration gives us the possibility of thinking about kinships not based on the objectification of plants imposed by large-scale extractivism. How can we think about our kinships with plants, and in general with the non-human, beyond control, ownership or domination?
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To Belong is to Dwell
Beyond identity and the erasures of national narratives, the novel develops a notion of belonging that focuses on the materiality of territories and offers an alternative to overcome the kindships of possession and dominion. Rivera Garza´s writing practices open the space for a mourning that allows for the construction of new kinships with territories. Autobiography of Cotton reflects on the creation of belonging kindships understood as interspecies alliances and entanglements based on mutual care following Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble.
The chapter “The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds,” begins with the questions Rivera Garza shares with Revueltas as he gazes at the desert sky and writes about the plurality of the matter that surrounds him and of which his body is a part. The matter of the desert which water, wind and cotton transform. This territory makes Rivera Garza perceive the larger network of life that the human belongs to as only a decentralized strand:
Belonging is the first condition […]. It is also the condition of the animal and the plant and the stone. To belong to the earth. To be one with the earth. To be summoned by the earth […] One belongs as one responds, by the mere fact of having a body, of being made of a matter in common […]. To belong is to be mediated; to accept that mediation. To give oneself to it. To belong is to dwell.15
Garza’s belonging has to do with participation in a community or a tapestry of life. This dwelling is traced by the author in the footprints of others, in the search for the plural root of the steps that bind different materialities. Hence, in this book Rivera Garza seeks to dwell on the footprints of her grandparents, following their steps and the movements of their bodies in the territory, in the mines, in the cotton fields and in the silent company of the cotton plants.
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Endnotes
- Arturo Escobar, Sentipensar con la tierra. Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (Medellín: Ediciones UNAULA, 2014).
- Donna, Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Generating Kinship in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.)
- Saidiya, Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 12, no. 26 (June 2008): 1-14, Project MUSE.
- Cristina Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación. (Bilbao: Consonni, 2021).
- Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 71.
- Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 20.
- Message received the day before yesterday president of the republic of Nuevo Laredo Tams: “Magna demonstration demands respect for minimum wage in the Camarón strikes. End totally repression Nuevo Leon government for workers putting immediate freedom José Arcos Prudencio Revueltas. Orders Camarón strike has more than fifteen days be resolved lawful. Organization and free expression of ideas respected. Alliance of workers’ and peasants’ organizations. General Secretary Jose P. Gonzalez. Sincerely Secretary. Party.”
Official Telegram Confirmation. Cristina Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón. (Ciudad de México: Penguin Random House, 2020), Kindle, 39-42. - Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón, 235.
- Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón, 59.
- Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, 12.
- Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, 11.
- Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, 11.
- Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón, 261.
- Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón, 268.
- Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón, 67-68.
Carolina Sánchez