Excerpt from Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I

ESTACIÓN CAMARÓN

[A wild wind; wind from the north]

The sound of hooves beating on the sandy ground comes first. Then the breathing, strained and short-winded. Panting. A snort. The white ground splits to allow the emergence of twisted acacias, with their rounded crowns and roots embedded deeply in the earth, and the thorny branches of mesquites, from which hang long, narrow pods and, now that it's almost spring, these yellow flowers. The galloping doesn't stop. Horseshoes dodge the spherical barrel cacti, whose burnished spiny tips appear here and there along the road. The white flowers of the anacahuita. The roadrunners. The worm lizards. Hadn't he been told this was a desert? There's no time to stop and look. From above, the light of an intransigent sun falls on the creosote bush, the coyotillo, the cat's claw. And the wind, raising the pinkish, gray, and cinnamon-colored dust of the plain, collides with the prickly pads of the nopal that ascend step by step, toward the sky. The earth crumbles as he passes, and everything around him thirsts for water. His mouth, most of all. His larynx. His stomach. He's not sure how many hours he's been mounted on the horse—thighs around the reddish torso, shoulders slumped forward, hands clenching the reins, and shoes crammed into the stirrups—but he'd like to feel he was nearing his destination. He's been told that there—a day's ride if he manages to get a change of horse—is where things are really happening. He's been told that if he wants to see direct action, if he truly wants to change the world, he should head farther north. There, just a stone's throw from the border, is Estación Camarón.

A strike has just broken out there.

[Gossypium hirsutum]

They are called "stations" because they are transit points, but just as soon as they are erected, people begin to move in. They are rancherias, colonias, settlements that never reach city status but that spring up in the blink of an eye around a crossroads. First comes the railroad; then, a camp. Later, somewhere to eat. From insignificant points on the map of a steppe with a reputation for being uninhabitable or a desert everyone steers clear of, they become places with names: Estación Rodríguez, for the rancher's name; Estación Camarón, for the reddish tint left by the waters of a river. Things are born and die several times in unpredictable cycles. One fine day, a general who has won the war looks out to the horizon and, instead of seeing a grim, dry wilderness, instead of seeing inhospitable prairies or empty spaces, sees neatly ordered parcels of land, sees crops and harvests. And he thinks: The agriculture will start here. His declaration would sound less grandiose if it weren't true. In brief memoranda, he orders the construction of a dam at the confluence of two rivers. And that dam also acquires a name: the Don Martín. Then it's a matter of allotting land. Correction: It's a matter of expropriating and then allotting land. And so, after decades of lying abandoned, the area was slowly repopulated. After years without a mail service, without telegrams, without a single face peeking through the dirty windows of the railroad carriages, heaps of people are there again. Men and women from Nuevo León and Coahuila, from San Luis Potosí and Texas, from Arizona, California, and heaven knows where else. Men, women, and children. Entire families loaded onto those wagons they call guayins, pulled by a pair of aged mules, plodding slowly and steadily along dirt tracks. Families on foot. People who stop to hunt an animal to have something to put in their bellies: a hare, some species of vesper rat, and, with a little luck, a wild boar. People who light fires to boil water and ward off the coyotes, and who rub their hands together as they stare into the flames. The echo of conversations. Laughter. After so much hardship, hope springs again.

Excerpted from Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza. Copyright © 2026 by Cristina Rivera Garza. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.