Conference "La frontera de algodón: un experimento agrícola, social y literario entre México y Estados Unidos"

Cristina Rivera Garza will speak to us about Autobiografía del algodón (Random House, 2020), a work in which literary genres intertwine like geographical borders, a multi-genre text that investigates the impact of cotton on the formation of the border between the United States and Mexico in the early 20th century. Based on field and archival research, its pages narrate the lives of her paternal grandparents, migrants who escaped severe conditions in central Mexico to later work in agriculture in Tamaulipas, as well as those of her maternal grandparents, who were deported from the United States in the early thirties. Furthermore, she argues that, although initially, cotton cultivation brought temporary prosperity to the region, later, soil erosion and pests abruptly ended this boom, with lasting consequences for the area. Cotton was first replaced by sorghum and later by maquiladoras, which eventually led to the violence of the so-called War on Drugs that has plagued the region.