The International Library

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

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Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT February 10, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Join us for an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cristina Rivera Garza (Liliana’s Invincible Summer) as she discusses her new novel, Autobiography of Cotton. 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.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs.

About The International Library

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.

Featuring

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera Garza

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.

Photo Credit: Annette Hornischer

Featured Book

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The Autobiography of Cotton

By Cristina Rivera Garza

Published by Graywolf Press

PURCHASE

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.

About Our Partners

Founded in 2000, the Center for the Art of Translation is a literary nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Our publications, events, and educational programming enrich the library of vital literary works, nurture and promote the work of translators, build audiences for literature in translation, and honor the incredible linguistic and cultural diversity of our schools and our world.

About this series