Cristina Rivera Garza writes that her grandparents fled a drought-stricken corner of Mexico and headed north at the beginning of the 20th century. As day laborers, they helped build Texas’s cattle ranches, coal mines and cotton and construction industries.
That list of enterprises is almost as lengthy as the compelling themes Cristina Rivera Garza takes on in the 27 essays collected in “Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country.” Running through her short pieces on family and global politics and drug trafficking and its violence is Rivera Garza’s desire to share optimism despite the grief. It’s a book about what keeps us awake at night, but also why we need to get beyond our anxieties. In a world with so many urgent crises, Rivera Garza has little patience for pessimism. Perhaps she learned that from her family.
In the essay about her relatives’ contribution to the United States, she describes President Herbert Hoover expelling families such as hers in response to the Great Depression. That did not end their multigenerational, cross-border story. The episode brought to my mind a phrase you hear from Hispanics in Colorado: “I didn’t cross the border. The border crossed me.” Rivera Garza, a 2020 MacArthur genius grant winner and a Mexican writer who teaches at the University of Houston, is concerned with what unites people on both sides of fluid concepts of migration. She offers a borderless definition of citizenship as solidarity that I found very moving: “We are just guests on the surface of a land that we experience in common.”
Another of her “Grieving” essays is devoted to what the pandemic clarified about the state of this shared world. She recounts, for example, that her mother was visiting her in Houston when they realized the seriousness of COVID. They decided her mother should return to Mexico City.
Rivera Garza writes that her mother was in the United States on a tourist visa, so “lacked the health insurance that would allow her to be admitted to a hospital if she got sick. Without an insurance card, she would be rejected, as so many others are, at the doors of any health establishment.”
Her mother is retired from the University of Mexico and though her pension is meager, it includes access to excellent health care – as Americans who go to Mexico for medical services know.
“My mother boarded a plane that deposited her in the capital of a country where, in spite of everything happening there, she is safer,” Rivera Garza writes.
Many of the essays preceding the one on the pandemic explore “everything happening there”: a government corrupted by narco lords’ money; a war on drugs that has become a war on people, particularly young people; the subjugation of women that makes their murder commonplace. Running through the essays is Rivera Garza’s idea that the Mexican government has abandoned its people – leaving their bodies vulnerable to assaults of every kind. Rivera Garza calls Mexico a “Visceraless State.” She also proposes that north of the border, it is unchecked capitalism that has left people abandoned, treated only as consumers, as if in a visceraless state.
One of her essays is about a book, “Estos últimos años en Ciudad Juárez,” in which young people in Ciudad Juarez describe how their lives were changed by the violence of the drug war in the early 2000s. Rivera Garza’s reflection made me think of how young Americans are finding their voices and speaking out about gun violence in the United States.
Rivera Garza quotes the young people of Ciudad Juarez saying, “They robbed us of our youth, indeed, but more importantly, they robbed us of our future.”
Then she observes: “Participating in this multivocal collection of testimonies may be a first step in regaining control over that long lost future, which is now our very own present , and along the way the story of those years, the marrow of their life stories, will be remembered. Those years may not have been beautiful, but they were theirs after all.”
A friend who has a therapist told me that laypeople tend to think therapy is about determining what is wrong. It’s also, my friend said, about identifying what is right with a person so that they understand they have the power and the tools to meet challenges. I read Rivera Garza as saying the same thing about society and societal ills. In one of my favorite of her essays, “Under the Narco Sky,” she describes a loving couple she sees having breakfast at a taqueria in Tijuana, which has endured its share of crime, violence and despair
“What is strange,” Rivera Garza thought as she watched the couple show their tenderness by treating one another with old-fashioned courtesy, “is not that rage and death, corruption and cruelty, multiply and grow under the narco sky, but that these two lovers exist, recently showered, lavishing each other with the always unprecedented, always unrepeatable, always transparent gestures of something that, if I were a little braver, I would not hesitate to call, fair and square, love.”
Rivera Garza is a writer who teaches young people, and she finds hope in the word and in the youth. In one essay, she describes the care with which students in her Spanish writing class in Houston critique one another’s work.
“If they are capable of giving so much of themselves during such difficult times, I believe they are capable of anything. And then I can sleep at night,” she writes.
As I mentioned, one of her essays is about the book “Estos últimos años en Ciudad Juárez.” She cites many other works of fiction and nonfiction in her essays, some books, others movies and even songs. I’m the kind of reader who takes notes of such references as recommendations, and will keep reading.
“El Traspatio,” a movie about changing gender roles in Mexico
“Precarious Life” by Judith Butler
“Seeing Red” and “Volverse Palestina” by Lina Meruane
“Luvina,” by Juan Rulfo
“The Queen of the South,” by Arturo Perez-Reverte
“Safe Area Gorazde,:l by Joe Sacco
She ends her book with a list of reasons to keep writing. Among them:
“Because when faced with the questions: Is it worth it to get up early in the morning just to keep writing? Can writing, in fact, be something that acts against fear or terror? Since when has a page stopped a bullet? Has someone ever used a book as a shield over their chest, just above their heart? Is there a protected zone, somehow invincible, around a written text? Is it possible, not to mention desirable, to grip or wield or raise a word? My answer continues to be yes.”
She is certainly a reason to keep reading.
In “Grieving”, Rivera Garza does not shy from describing horrors that have become everyday. But she strives to write about them in a different way, memorializing the human in a world seemingly bent on dehumanizing and brutalizing. Her work answers the question: Is there a new way to read and think about the horrific that will lead to new action?