Pulitzer to Cristina Rivera Garza | “For years I couldn’t pronounce her name”: the Mexican writer awarded for a memoir about her sister’s femicide

Every time Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza tried to write about the femicide of her sister Liliana, murdered in 1990 when she was barely 20 years old, words failed her.

Finally, in 2020, encouraged by the rise of feminist movements in Latin America, the writer decided to open the boxes of her sister’s possessions, intact since her death.

The papers she found helped her find new ways to talk about what happened.

The result was “The invincible summer of Liliana” (2021), the most intimate work of one of the most important authors of current literature in Spanish, which has now been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category.

The novelist, poet and essayist born in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in 1964 is also a professor at the University of Houston, Texas, USA, and among her prolific work are the titles “Nobody will see me cry” (1999), ” The Crest of Ilion” (2002), “Green Shanghai” (2011) and “The Evil of the Taiga” (2012).

By telling Liliana’s story, Rivera Garza wanted to give voice to the thousands of women victims of femicides in Mexico and offers an exploration of what she calls sexist and patriarchal violence.

“For many years I was not even able to pronounce his name, much less talk about what had happened.”Rivera Garza told the program Outlook from the BBC in an interview at the end of April.

“Grief became a forced silencing, and something very private that was often linked with feelings of guilt and shame, because that is how society shows these stories“.

The memoir about Liliana, which has been praised for its honesty and importance, was not only Rivera Garza’s tribute to her sister’s life, but also a powerful and moving exploration of pain, violence and the fight for justice in the labyrinthine Mexican judicial system.

Liliana Rivera Garza, architecture student at UNAM, died on July 16, 1990. She was 20 years old.

The young woman had tried for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend “who insisted on not letting her go.”

When Liliana finally made the decision, “he decided that she would not have a life without him,” Rivera Garza told the BBC.

Almost three decades later, the writer found a box of letters, writings and notes from Liliana: a detailed archive of herself and her life.

With those documents Rivera Garza He undertook a meticulous job of reconstructing the life and death of his younger sister.

“What I found totally surprised me. There were tons of little pieces of paper… there were all kinds of things she had written, notes to herself, reminders to buy food for the cat, letters to her friends, messages… and notebooks where there were written what I thought.

“The moment I touched those papers, the feeling of Liliana’s presence was overwhelming,” explained the author.

“Then I knew that I finally had a book, that this was Liliana’s voice, and that this book had to exist.”

Rivera Garza considered this story as a tool to denounce and seek justice because three decades later no one had been convicted of the murder of his sister.

There had not even been any arrests, no indictments, no trials. No sense of justice for the young woman.

In 1990 the sisters lived separate lives: Liliana studying in Mexico City and Cristina pursuing a doctorate in Houston, Texas.

In July of that year, two women from the Mexican consulate knocked on her door. And Cristina’s world “collapsed.”

“As soon as I opened the door and they mentioned Liliana’s name I knew immediately that something terrible had happened.“, he recalled.

“They said there had been an accident. I asked if it was fatal and they said yes. I didn’t want to ask any more.”

Rivera Garza took care of all the “practical matters” that followed Liliana’s death and even now says that he does not know with certainty when or how he found out how his sister had died.

“I remember an uncle said: ‘I hope Liliana has had a great love in her life.’ I was alarmed by the comment and for the first time I thought about the possibility that there could have been some type of domestic violence. Nobody had told me anything. .It was that comment that made me think about it.

“When I arrived in Mexico City… I met with a cousin who took me by the arm, told me to sit down, that he had to talk to me, and crying he told me that after reviewing the information It was clear that Ángel González Ramos, her ex-boyfriend, had murdered her“.

Liliana had been found dead in her apartment. She had been suffocated and she had probably been sexually assaulted.

The police suspected that Ángel González Ramos, Liliana’s ex-boyfriend, was responsible.

There were witnesses who had seen or heard him in Liliana’s building. And from the beginning of the investigation, González Ramos became the main suspect.

But when he found out that the police were looking for him, He fled and could never be arrested.

Liliana’s case became one more in the long list of unsolved femicides in Mexico.

In the book, Rivera Garza points out that the grief his family experienced over the death of his sister and the confusion over what happened somehow hindered the process of seeking justice.

“What comes up during grief when you lose someone to violence is, above all, the difficulty of talking about it in a way that is fair to the victim. So for us it was very difficult to talk about what had happened,” Rivera Garza said.

“The way society shows these stories is often blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrators“.

Thus, for 30 years the family did not speak “at all” about Liliana’s death.

It was in recent years, with a better understanding of discrimination and violence against women, when they were able to affirm that Liliana had been a victim of femicide.

“I was following the development of a strong feminist movement both in Latin America and elsewhere and saw how they were creating narratives that were capable of to interrogate and dismantle the patriarchal narratives that had not allowed me, and many others, to speak openly about this type of violence.

“And so I knew that the story I hadn’t been able to tell could now be told in a way that didn’t hurt my sister and in a way that others would be willing to hear.”

When “The Invincible Summer of Liliana” was published in 2021, the author expected to receive information about her sister’s murder.

He received, he indicated, “tons of emails.” One of them was from someone who claimed to have been a friend of González Ramos.

The email had a link and said it was the link to González Ramos’s funeral, which He had allegedly been using another name and had died in Southern California.

“When I clicked on the link, what I saw were photographs of Ángel González Ramos from his childhood until the 2020s.

“Part of me was convinced that the man was dead. But another part thinks it’s a huge coincidence: that when I start looking for him, he conveniently is found dead.”

And that, she said, made her feel “deeply sad, because somehow she was convinced that she could catch him.”

“But what I know now, after all this time, is that Liliana, like many other women, did not have the language that would have allowed her to identify and therefore protect herself against gender violence.

“I also know that telling these stories is a matter of life and death in many places around the world. Because the only thing that can transform grief is justice: neither forgiveness nor forgetting..

“That is why it is important to continue denouncing acts of impunity,” says Rivera Garza.

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