Juan Villoro
Cristina Rivera Garza has become the first Mexican voice to receive the Pulitzer Prize in the memoir or autobiography category. The award, founded in 1917, waited more than a century for this to happen.
In journalism, the Pulitzer can be obtained by people of any nationality who have published unpublished texts in the U.S. media. In literature, belonging to or having permanent residence in that country is necessary.
Born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in 1964, Rivera Garza has studied and taught on both sides of the border. A graduate in Sociology from UNAM, she received her PhD in Latin American History from the University of Houston, where she also received an honorary doctorate and founded the first graduate-level Bilingual Creative Writing Program, which she currently directs. While Donald Trump promised to build a wall, she opened a space to write and think about in the two languages of the border and their possible blends. Her academic merits have also earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, known in the academic circuit as the “Genius” Fellowship.
Image: on wikipedia.org
This intense academic work has not kept her away from writing. In her first novel, Nadie me verá llorar ((No one will see me cry), she retraced the incipient steps of Mexican psychiatry. Much of the plot is set in the sanatorium of La Castañeda. It is no coincidence that an observer of border life has become interested in the borderline condition of the patients, often accused of insanity due to discrimination.
Rivera Garza mixes essays and fiction to narrate decisive national episodes. Había mucha neblina o humo o no se qué explores (There was a lot of haze or smoke, or I don’t know what you are exploring.) Juan Rulfo’s working life and the scenarios on which it was based, among them, the ghost town of Luvina, which is almost empty because it is a site of migrant expulsion.
In Autobiografía del algodón (Autobiography of Cotton), she takes passages from El luto humano (The human mourning), José Revueltas’s novel, and follows the routes of the indigenous people who went to work in the north of the country. This leads her to discover the cultural origin of her own family, which came from San Luis Potosí but had erased the traces of its indigenous origin.
Rivera Garza, a chronicler of a shifting homeland, reveals that the entire country is no man’s land and that the border is everywhere.
The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to her for the English version of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a chronicle of her sister’s murder on July 16, 1990. Like so many femicides, this one remains unpunished, and the author decided to submit it to the alternate tribunal of memory. Through letters and memories, she reconstructed the image of a young woman whose main wealth was the future. An ethical lesson, the book does not emphasize what was destroyed but what resists beyond destruction. In the timeless time of writing, Liliana’s life is once again ahead of her. This valuation of absence does not restore what was lost, but prevents it from disappearing.
On July 21, 2023, Rivera Garza asked in her commencement speech at the Colegio Nacional: “How to write against violence using the language that gives it a foothold and normalizes it?” and answered: “Writing is a fundamentally critical practice. Creative writing can awaken and activate a language that, from power and within the parapets of power, is numbed and paralyzed. My task as a writer in this and other subjects is, then, to explore and unravel, subvert and complicate those narratives presented as a given thing or as a condition of existence”.
On that same occasion, I commented in response to her words: “The horizon of the displaced is unknown, but our literature has a singular way of telling it. Rivera Garza is the great author of forced and voluntary displacements, the product of necessity or rebellion, determined by physical effort or the work of the mind. In digital times, she recovers realities and listens to those who go on foot. As a historian, but above all as a writer, she knows that the past is always on the verge of happening.”
A relevant writer enhances the award given to her. It took 107 years for the Pulitzer to honor itself with the exceptional migratory voice of Cristina Rivera Garza.
This piece was published in Spanish by Reforma on May 10, 2024
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