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Tragic transition from cotton to drug cartels on Mexican border

Cotton fields of the 1930s along the U.S.-Mexico border today are controlled by drug cartels, according to a speaker who appeared recently at Lycoming College.

“The Tamulipas section of Mexico is one of death and destruction,” author Cristina Rivera Garza said.

Her relatives were part of friendlier and more pleasant times in that area, when families bonded and picked cotton in the 1930s. Now it is a part of the nation that is most feared among those traveling through it.

Border cities there and in the U.S. have been replaced by a culture of death, one raising its ugly head as heroin and the drug trade that continues to impact Williamsport and the region, she said.

In her presentation, “Chronicles from the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Afterlife of Cotton: Documentary Fiction and Road Trip,” Rivera Garza shared how her road trip last summer was inspiration for her next novel, a bit fiction and part documentary.

She accomplished her research in a worn 1990s Volvo diesel without air or heat. The trip took her from San Diego, California, east to Savannah, Georgia, and back again.

It served as a journey of discovery to inspire her novel. It began as presidential candidate Donald Trump made statements upsetting vast numbers of Mexican people when he spoke about his promise to build a wall on the border and get Mexico to pay for it and that many Mexicans were among those bringing dangerous drugs, such as heroin, into America’s cities, adding to the plight of drug abuse.

In her talk, however, Rivera Garza focused more on sharing history and photographs of the poor farmers – including her grandfather – hardworking sorts who picked cotton and raised families.

“The loss of the cotton fields to drought and failures of dams led to sweatshops and, later, to the rise of Mexico’s drug cartel and the subsequent brutal violence of the war on drugs,” she said.

Today, cities just a few miles south of the border towns of El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona, have sections where cancer patients seek cheap prescriptions and cures and drug cartels operate with impunity, she said.

“The present circumstances for the people is a desperate situation,” she said. “It is an example of the politics of death.”

Communities, such as Williamsport, too, continue to see what the drug cartels are bringing to larger cities and traffickers bring here.

Rivera Garza is a writing professor at the University of Houston who has written several novels, poetry collections and non-fiction books, many of which have been translated into multiple languages. Her works have earned four international awards and she is the Breeden Eminent Scholar at Auburn University.

Born in Matamoros, Mexico, Rivera Garza has lived in the United States since 1989.

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