If she were West African, Cristina Rivera Garza would be a griot, the kind that sends chills down your spine, not because she’s telling you a horror story but because she pivots the mirror toward your face just as you’re waking up, a slight buildup of dried drool lodged at the right corner of your lips. Rivera Garza is insistent on studying how each mole lies across your face, the embryonic mass of cells that sow themselves in the epidermis, and on how our fate might be far more porous than we believe. And when she does this, Rivera Garza offers us a story, not at whim, but a tale that acts as a clarion call: what it means to let a stranger into one’s home.

In her latest book, Autobiography of Cotton—first published in Spanish by Literatura Random House six years ago as Autobiografía del algodón—she begins with an insurrection: in 1934, five thousand workers in northern Mexico went on strike at a cotton plantation built alongside an irrigation system engineered to produce the cash crop. The book depicts the workers and campesinos who migrated to the northern state of Nuevo León, hoping to acquire land, even as they tilled on their bosses’ cotton estates. Due to drought and floods, the venture would collapse. The text is structured as a series of reflections on historical and contemporary events in northern Mexico, mostly narrated by a researcher who appears to be Rivera Garza. Part of what places Autobiography of Cotton in the creative realm is the profound interiority the author gives her characters, for whom there are very few written or oral testimonies about the incidents in question. What emerges is a politically acute, evidence-based version of Robert Scholes’s concept of fabulation. Blending autofiction, history, and memoir, Rivera Garza examines the changes of landscape and people through terse episodes that play against linearity. At the same time, she grounds us in the semi-fictional world of cotton, a force that perturbs the landscape, especially as farmworkers are stripped of their sovereignty.

Raw cotton smells musty, an earthy boll that subtly tickles your nose as your fingers brush it. You can pick it, but not eat it; process it, but not cook it. Cotton is an enigma, and yet, it’s everywhere. But unless we live in proximity to cotton plantations—kneading or even altering it—we might not be aware of this very old plant’s richness. The origin of the genus Gossypium dates back five to ten million years, and wild cotton was independently domesticated in four regions of the world as early as 7,000 years ago. Although there are fifty species of cotton, only four are cultivated for commerce. The intimacy that comes from handling this cash crop is closely tied to a prodigious economy, which cleared wild forests and forced the wretched to work the land for export, or to refuse that labor when they felt overburdened.

For anyone acculturated in the United States, the cotton plantation is steeped in legend, celebrated for its technological innovation (the Cotton Gin) and condemned as a torture camp for enslaved Black people. Cotton feels like a US Southern story, even though Gossypium hirsutum took on another course in early-twentieth-century Mexico, bewildering and oppressive for another set of crestfallen people. The plant was both a menace and a harbinger, and an assemblage for nomads, both within and outside the post-revolutionary state.