The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven

An American drifter in post-Revolutionary Mexico

B. Traven was a German writer who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The name is a pseudonym. The exact identity of the writer has never been verified, but there are a few educated guesses. Traven’s debut novel, The Cotton-Pickers, was originally published in 1925 in the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It first appeared in book form the following year under the title of The Wobbly, but subsequent editions have used the original title of The Cotton-Pickers.

Gerald Gales is an American drifter wandering through Mexico. He gets a tip that a farmer named Mr. Shine is looking for cotton pickers. Seeking work, Gales sets out to find the farm in the vicinity of an obscure place called Ixtlixochicuauhtepec. At a train station, he meets up with five other drifters looking for the same Mr. Shine. The six wandering laborers decide to team up and travel together to find Shine’s farm, where they then sign on to pick his cotton.

The novel takes place shortly following the Mexican Revolution and the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Since that momentous regime change, the Mexican workers supposedly have more rights, but the employers still exploit them and treat them very much like peons. Here, all the employers seem to be White Europeans or Americans, while the laborers are mostly people of color: Latinos, Indigenous Mexicans, Blacks, Asians (though Gales is White). The Cotton-Pickers is first and foremost a novel about labor. Traven depicts the squalid conditions under which the cotton pickers live and work. Mr. Shine tries to pay them as little as possible, but the workers find ways of fighting for their rights and attaining small victories. This story, however, is not told in the depressing style of a muckraking exposé. Rather, it’s more of a comedy infused with a persistent gallows humor. The cotton pickers work like mules, but they also have fun and enjoy their lives as vagabonds. Traven doesn’t really push any socialist agenda, but he does point out the absurdities and abuses of capitalism and colonialism. Beyond Shine’s farm, the narrative also follows Gales as he moves on to other jobs, sometimes accompanied by a cotton-picking friend or two.

I had heard the name B. Traven before, but this is my first time reading his work. He is best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the basis for the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart film. I really enjoyed this book. Rarely does it occur that I “discover” an author and immediately think I want to read everything this person wrote, but such is the case with Traven. (I also love Mexico, so that probably has something to do with it.) Traven’s closest equivalent might be John Steinbeck, as seen in labor novels like The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. Traven, however, comes across with fewer pretensions of literary dignity and more of a down-to-earth matter-of-fact bluntness. His prose often has the feel of pulp fiction, with occasional touches of Ernest Hemingway or Jack London. For a book from the 1920s, The Cotton-Pickers is remarkably forthright and uninhibited. In one memorable passage, Traven describes a whorehouse in Tampico and captures its raunchy reality without ever saying anything obscene.

The term “Wobbly” was a nickname for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. Neither Gales nor anyone else in the book is a member of the IWW, but Gale reminds someone of a Wobbly in that wherever he goes, labor trouble follows. That’s not explained until the final page of the book. The Cotton-Pickers is a much better title. Gales is a recurring character in several of Traven’s books. I look forward to following his Mexican wanderings in subsequent novels.
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