CCA--San Francisco

Reading by Cristina Rivera Garza

       

Presented as part of the Writers Series (MFA Program in Writing)

Friday, September 23, 4:30 pm 

Writers’ Studio, San Francisco Campus

195 De Haro at 15th Street
Free and open to the public
More info: Naomi Washer, nwasher@cca.edu or 415.551.9237
Cristina Rivera Garza is a novelist, poet, and border-crosser. She is the only author to be awarded the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice -- in 2001 for Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry, 2003); and in 2009 for La muerte me da.
Her most recent books are La imaginación pública (2015) and Los muertos indóciles -- essays on writing at the crossroads of violence and digital technology.
She is a distinguished professor of Hispanic Studies and creative writing at the University of Houston.

About the Writers Series

CCA's MFA Program in Writing proudly offers the Writers Series, a year-round literary series that features a continuum of talented, successful, and, in many cases, world-renowned writers and poets.

The series is both a curricular requirement (Friday Seminar) for our first-year graduate students and an integral part of the college's celebrated public programs schedule.
All events are free and open to the public. Unless otherwise noted in the event listing, events are held from 4:30 to 6 p.m at the CCA Writers’ Studio.crg

THE AFTERLIFE OF COTTON: Through the Past and Present of a Border Town, in trail of Literary Legend José Revueltas

1.

Between 2010 and 2012, the Zetas cartel turned the Piedras Negras prison into a factory of uniforms, bulletproof jackets and desaparecidos, the Mexican journalist Diego Osorno claimed, not too long ago.ⁱ Near Piedras Negras, in the norteño state of Coahuila, lies the Don Martin Dam. The Zetas transformed it into an underwater narco-grave. Constructions are haunted spaces, anthropologist Saiba Varma once said in an animated talk about infrastructures. There are soft infrastructures, like hospitals and factories, and hard ones, like highways and bridges. Like dams. Hard, indeed. The dam is an amphitheater, solemn and noble. You can’t forget the bodies that constructed them, insisted Varma. Nor those that died there. You can’t forget, she kept on insisting. There is an underwater mass grave in the middle of the desert, near the Mexico-U.S. border. I insist. 

2.

Construction on the Don Martin Dam officially began in January 1927 — only 10 years after the drafting of the Mexican Constitution officially ended the armed phase of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Located in the Juárez municipality in the northernmost corner of the state of Coahuila, very close to the border with the United States, the dam came to occupy the riverbed between the Salado and the Sabinas rivers, right in the midst of a ranch owned by one Martín Guajardo, hence its name. 

Read this article in the September issue of High Country News

--crg