The International Library Presents Cristina Rivera Garza on Autobiography of Cotton with Rita Indiana

In this hybrid of history, archival research, fiction, and personal inquiry, Rivera Garza retraces the paths of the campesinos and laborers who shaped the cotton-growing region between Tamaulipas, Mexico, and Texas—a once prosperous territory that has been transformed by migration, displacement, and the violence of the modern border.

With characteristic curiosity and lyrical precision, Rivera Garza explores how the search for one’s origins can lead to silences, revelations, and the fragile architecture of memory itself. The result is a deeply intimate reencounter with land and lineage, revealing how personal history is braided into broader stories of labor, loss, and survival.

Rita Indiana, writer, composer, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, will join Rivera Garza to reflect on the power of literature to excavate memory, reclaim territory, and illuminate the spaces where personal and collective histories meet.

This is a hybrid event. Cristina Rivera Garza and Rita Indiana will appear in person at the The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY (7:00 pm ET). A live remote viewing will be held at Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco (4:00 pm PT). You can also livestream this event worldwide. Registration(opens in a new tab) is required to attend in person in Brooklyn and for online access to the livestream. To attend the live remote viewing at Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, please RSVP to events@catranslation.org.

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-U.S. 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.

This event is part of The International Library, a collaboration between The Center for Fiction and the Center for the Art of Translation. Join us for a series of conversations across time, place, language, and culture, with live audiences in San Francisco and Brooklyn—and more locations to come. This series will guide readers to think critically about how stories are told and explore the inspiration, philosophy, and craft of international storytellers.