World Literature: Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Autobiography of Cotton” (Mexico)

Photo Credit: Annette Hornischer

This March, City of Asylum is delighted to welcome Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza as she shares her latest novel, Autobiography of Cotton. The novel is a work of autofiction inspired by her grandparents and Mexican writer and activist José Revueltas, which speaks to agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration. Cristina will be joined in conversation by Anderson Tepper.

Praised by Time as one of “The Most Anticipated Books of 2026,” Cristina’s latest novel has been described as “[a] sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighboring nations.” Autobiography of Cotton takes a young José Revueltas’s travels to Tamaulipas in 1934 to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, as well as Revueltas’s resulting novel Human Mourning, and weaves them into the tapestry of Cristina’s own family history.

She 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. The result is a stunning amalgam of archival research and personal narrative, through which Cristina chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. 

An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

You can purchase a copy of Cristina’s book, Autobiography of Cotton, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

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. 

About the Moderator:

Anderson Tepper is a guest curator of PEN America’s World Voices Festival and a longstanding member of the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Literary Council and international committee. Formerly of Vanity Fair, his writing on books and authors has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and World Literature Today, among other publications. Anderson also serves on City of Asylum’s Advisory Board.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but a cash wine bar will be available.