“Queer Errantry” In The Work Of Cristina Rivera Garza

Abstract

In this essay I consider two books by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza – Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2016) [There Was a Lot of Fog or Smoke or I Don’t Know What] and Autobiografía del algodón (2020) [Autobiography of Cotton] which conjugate journeys to sites in Mexico where agricultural and industrial labour played a critical role in the country’s post-revolutionary reconstruction. I illustrate how these works not only spotlight the long-term effects of dispossession, transnational migration, and “slow violence” but also articulate an epistemology of what I call “queer errantry”. Drawing on ideas from Edouard Glissant, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sara Ahmed, I argue that, in the context of significant environmental and gender violence in Mexico and its “visceraless” state, for Rivera Garza travel and pedestrianism function as acts of relation, forms of reckoning with the rapid acceleration of capitalist modernity. As a way of reading and representing the world, “queer errantry”, I suggest, comprises a decolonial feminist praxis of orientation and remembrance.