Links with the past from the present in Desierto sonoro by Valeria Luiselli and Autobiografía del algodón by Cristina Rivera Garza

Abstract

In this work I start from the concept "geological writings" (2022) proposed by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza (1964) to link it with the notions of the land, territoriality, displacements and rewritings of the past and its impact on the present in the Mexican novels Desierto sonoro (2019), by Valeria Luiselli (1983) and Autobiografía del algodón (2020), by Cristina Rivera Garza. The rewritings of official discourses and personal and collective histories, of other ways of living and letting oneself be inhabited by the landscapes embedded in the land and by the affections generated by belonging, the right to reside and to stay become fundamental in these geological writings. The borderland in relation to traces and residence as the right to belong is redefined with a record endowed with new meanings so as not to be erased from the map, nor to be from a place that does not appear on it. In these fictions there is a progressive impulse to fictionalize experiences that, based on the translation and rewriting of the official discourses of a revisited history, create creative fictions of the present that redefine the past with the right to stay.