Overview

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-United States 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.

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Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the University of Houston's PhD in creative writing in Spanish. Kim Ramirez is a second-generation Irish-Mexican originally from Texas. Her storytelling career has flourished in front of the camera, behind the mic, and on the stage. She grew up around bilingual working-class families where people met the challenges of life with laughter, wise cracks, and sometimes head cracks. But through a series of opportunities, she had the privilege of experiencing life among the upper echelons of society as well. This unique background allows Kim to seamlessly adapt to a wide spectrum of roles, from portraying dry comedic characters with a gritty edge to a powerful queen commanding a room. Her voice is characterized by authenticity, richness, and a deep well of knowledge as well as a sharp dryness. She takes particular pride in having narrated books across a few genres that have Queer and BIPOC characters as the leads, two communities dear to her heart. When not in her booth or in front of the camera, she's busy momin' it up: cooking, crafting, or raising hell. Christina MacSweeney is the award-winning literary translator of works by Julian Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and Elvira Navarro. She received the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Veronica Gerber Bicecci's The Company.

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