“Mestizas of Cotton”

from Autobiography of Cotton (Literatura Random House, November 2020)

By Cristina Rivera Garza

Translated from the Spanish by Kolin Jordan

Gloria Anzaldúa discovered her Nahual—her spirit animal—in a cotton field on the other side of the Río Bravo, on the Texan side of this story. The encounter with the rattlesnake happened while she picked in the fields at the Jesús María plantation. The sound of the animal startled her and, rather than fleeing or protecting herself, she froze. Fear. Will. The snake’s fangs got stuck in her work boot. Suddenly, her mother appeared and, raising her hoe, killed it with one strike. But that wasn’t enough. Touched by fear, now Gloria had to overcome her terror. She took her pocketknife and marked every one of the places that needed healing with an X: the back of her neck, under her arms, between her legs. As soon as her mother was out of sight among the furrows, she searched the ground for the viper’s blood. She knelt nearby. She placed her lips in a pool of the red liquid and drew it into her mouth, only to then spit it out on the cotton plants. She buried the snake’s rattles in that spot, twelve in all. In the morning she tells the story in Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza, “I saw through the serpent’s eyes, felt its blood course through my veins. The snake, my tone, my animal nature. I was immune to its venom. Forever immune. To live in the cotton border, to survive day to day in a world of men armed with machetes and tractors intent upon changing the horizon of the earth, a woman needed a snake at her side.”

Petra had her own. As soon as they arrived at the plot of land assigned to them above hole 147, they had to continue tilling. Although the little shack was already half-constructed at the front of the lot, it was still necessary to remove mesquites, ebonies, thorny trees, and sweet acacias from the rest of the property. Before the Ejidal Bank came to break up the land, they had to clear it all. The government had provided them with hatchets, machetes, and mattocks. So with implements in hand, they rose early and started working. It felt so different working their own land. So much easier. The hours passed so much faster. Sometimes Petra stayed in the house looking after the children and cutting firewood to prepare meals or boil clothing. Other times she placed a lunch of potatoes with eggs and refried beans in pewter dishes and took it to Chema working among the weeds. It wasn’t unusual for her to leave the children with Francisca, the oldest, to go to the hills with her own axe. It was on one of those occasions that she encountered the viper. Chema had already told her not to go, that this was men’s work. “Out here you never know what you’re going to find,” he had told her many times, wiping sweat from his brow, with his chin resting on the head of the mattock. “Well, the same could happen to you, right?” she replied, without changing her tone. And just like that she would take the axe or the machete or whatever tool Chema had left at the shack, and she’d go to the hills. She had seen armadillos and deer, ducks, pigeons, mourning doves, and wild boars. But she’d never come across anything like the rattlesnake that cut across her path that late January morning. If she’d had the strength to tell the story that night she would have said that she’d never forget the diamond-shaped head and the bifurcated tongue. She would have talked, overall, about the menacing hissing of its body that had caused her hair to stand on end; or the frenzied sound of the rattles while it drew spirals in the dirt. “You’re too close,” she told herself. And she stopped. Still, full of fear, she couldn’t take her eyes off it. It had white lines on its face and, among the vertical grooves she could make out two yellow pupils that encompassed the entirety of the world. Petra gripped the axe instinctively, holding it in front of her chest in an uncomfortable position. Fiery and combative, the snake examined her all the same. What would it gain by sinking its fangs into such a common woman with her long black hair who looked at it with equal parts terror and curiosity? The recognition lasted mere seconds, but to Petra it felt like an eternity. There, in that eternity, she saw her life. The child that ran through the dust clouds of Los Cuarenta. The girl that learned how to read and write in a miners’ camp. The young woman that found herself with a husband and children in a happily ever after. The irrigation canals in Zaragoza. Juanita. The foliage where the birds hid in the morning. The cotton days in Estación Camarón. The strikes. Chepo. Francisca. Antonio. Aristeo. Everything, in some strange and present way, all made sense. Everything came to her completely in this instant on this plot of land that she could now call her own. “It has all led to this,” she told herself, sure that the reptile would attack her. And she closed her eyes. When she opened them all she saw was the trail the serpent had left in the dust. That was the only way she knew it hadn’t been a dream. She crouched down and, as if possessed by a serene and unfamiliar force, she placed her index finger on the trail left by the animal. She had been warned. She gave thanks to something in the heavens and took a deep breath. How many more years did she have on earth? The question made her tremble. Later, without thinking much of it, she took out all her fear, all her anger, all of that frenetic sensation of having been inches from death, on the wobbly stems of the brush that obstructed her way. Chema could make out a few things from afar: Petra was silent with a serious expression on her face. She seemed lost in her thoughts while the axe rose and fell incessantly. Over and over. She showed such strength, such determination, that they finished the work at more or less the same time as the neighboring ranchers. By the time the Ejidal Bank started to send the tractors to till the earth, their land was ready. Anzaldúa left, eventually. Leaving behind friends and family, country and customs. Andariega left southern Texas for the west coast. San Francisco. Who could blame her? In 1942, when a small border town was born in Raymondville, Anzaldúa witnessed the end of the planting season. On the other side of the border the agricultural industrialization also inflicted changes on the property and on ways of working. “I saw how they dismantled the earth,” she says. “I saw how they divided the land in miles of squares and rectangles for irrigation.” Gloria’s father was forced to become a sharecropper to survive, and every member of the entire family became seasonal laborers either in the fields, diary, or chicken farms for the same company. Just like the agriculturalists on the Mexican side, the Anzaldúa family received credit for planting and to live, though not from the state, but rather from a private company: Río Farms, Incorporated. At the end of the season, caught in the merciless credit cycle, they had to pay, often many times more than what they’d earned. These precarious conditions, accompanied by a cultural tyranny that assigned limited roles to women, wound up dissuading her. After studying in institutions in southern Texas and, being as she was: rebellious, stubborn, queer, Gloria left that world that condemned her to obedience or standardization. It’s hard to know how they fought against all of this, or how they adapted to it, the women that stayed in the cotton fields. Ultimately, like few other crops, cotton picking has benefitted from the calloused hands of children, women, whole families working from sunup to sundown to fill sacks as quickly as possible. Their voices, among all those in those fields of white gold, are the most inaudible. The ones that whisper the most softly. Still, I suspect that many of the early colonial women on the border shared more than just a job and landscape with Anzaldúa. Without the power to explore, without a shared determination, without the ability to investigate mountains a little further away, they wouldn’t have survived in the unfriendly borderlands. They are, in their own way, new mestizas. Their first assignments like those of today: clear, thresh, shell. In the fields as in life. Old mestizas. Mestizas of cotton.