“In the depths of winter I finally learned that there was an invincible summer in me,” he wrote. Albert Camus. It was like this Liliana Rivera Garza She had decided to get out of the darkness that surrounded her at only 20 years old and end the dangerous relationship with her boyfriend. And that’s how Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, Mexico, 1964)her older sister, decided to write this book about Liliana’s unsolved murder.
“When the editors asked me what my wish was for this book, I answered, automatically, that I wanted Liliana to go far“says the writer. Liliana He was an architecture student, he liked to write letters and read poetry. She was a brilliant girl with all her contradictions and flaws, full of love and hope. She is a girl like so many, but whose life was taken from her July 16, 1990. A girl, like so many, who suffered gender violence and who, like so many, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend.
Cover of Cristina Rivera Garza’s book ‘The Invincible Summer of Liliana’, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize.
“I don’t believe in therapeutic capacity of the writing. I also don’t believe that a book can put someone in jail. But can restore collective memory and count the truth“The murderer of his sister, Ángel González Ramos, He was 23 years old when he fled just after killing her in her home. weighs on him a warrant still in force, but has never set foot in a court, much less in prison. Today he remains free and will continue to be so. Liliana became one of the hundreds of women who are murdered every year in Mexico.
29 years later, Cristina Rivera Garza decided to reopen Liliana’s boxes of notes, notes, letters and photographs. She went to the Mexico City prosecutor’s office and asked for her sister’s file. Two years later she published Liliana’s invincible summer (Random House, 2021), whose English edition just won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in the category of Memoir or Autobiography.
“I don’t know if he or his family has read the book. But I do want to tell you one thing: It mattered a lot to me that Liliana’s photograph appeared on the cover of the book.. Among other things, she wanted the murderer and her family to see Liliana everywhere, telling them that she is still here with us.” Rivera Garza defines it as her “act of revenge”although the most important thing about all this is that Liliana has transcended. At the end of everything, it has been shown that she is the one who has the last word and that it will always be that way.
Break the silence
“For my family it has been important to leave behind a silent mourning“. The writer decides to opt for a alternative way to tell one atrocious story. The book begins with a very personal matter, but it is not written from an isolated, self-absorbed self. Reconstruct the events of the murdertells the relationship that she herself had with her sister, leaving free all the reflections that arose.
He says that his most critical discussions always had to do with the love. Liliana always took the side of love, while Cristina rejected it, she did not want to believe in that feeling. “My position was one radical disbelief. At that time I thought that Liliana was naive and conservative. Now, reading her papers, I understand her position. freein search of a autonomy“.
The writer Cristina Rivera Garza, author of ‘The Invincible Summer of Liliana’. Photo: Marta Calvo
Through writing, consciousness changes, points of view transform and reflections open. The question “Can you be happy while grieving?” It emerges again and again in the flow of the pages. Rivera Garza travels through all the emotions that arise within the pain itself and faces them, as if in front of a mirror. Behind grief lies guilt, sadness, and anger that fight against the reality of a world “that continues out there”.
However, the author now answers a resounding “we better”. With a huge smile and a body that exudes vitality, she states: “For me, grief has been Liliana’s constant company. I see no reason for it to end.” Thus, he teaches us that the feeling, although painful, of a loss, never goes away, it is something with which we will have to live with for the rest of our lives.
In the end, it is not just the story of a feminicide. Rivera Garza portrays his sister, her grief, her dreams, her relationship with love and teaches us what lies beyond death. Decide celebrate life of Liliana through her own words, her thoughts and her doubts written in notes, phrases, diaries. Liliana’s invincible summer became “the book of his voice”from his experience.
Build a collective memory
“It seems important to me that with writing we can tell these stories in another way, build a collective memorybring with us those lost to violence and put on the discussion table a TRUE which is also fundamental.” In 1990 Mexican justice declared Liliana’s murder a “crime of love”.
The hegemonic narrative most powerful, until now, has been that of patriarchy that blames women for the violence they suffer and exonerates the perpetrators. “I believe that both to write and to live we need a nearby communitystrong, generous.” The writer believes in defense of public spaceas a space for everyone, to conquer rights and fight for freedoms.
“We writers borrow the structures of the languageproduced by specific communitiesusually in conditions of inequality. We use a language that has history, convulsions, turbulence.” With this book, the writer has not only managed name each action with your words, but it has returned an important injustice to the world. Because the death of his sister was not a crime of love, nor an accident, it was a feminicideas it is.
Cristina Rivera Garza. Photo: Marta Calvo
Rivera Garza tried to write the book twicetwo versions that he threw away and deleted without thinking, before getting the definitive. “To write this book I had to write all the previous ones,” she explains. The author began reading and writing poetry. Liliana’s invincible summer is his first novel “I was very clear about the issue, I wanted to avoid any type of sensationalism and I tried to have a clearer relationship with language“. But the rhythms of the silences and the unfolding of the text on the pages are repeated in a love concentration that explodes in Liliana’s book.
The author came across this learning that culminated in a written story that lasts and endures. However, this does not mean that Liliana’s story has ended here. “Recently I discovered the first article she published in a newspaperwhich confirms to me that she took care of her writing for an ulterior purpose.
The life of Liliana he continues to open up, through his friends, the passions he left behind, and the various identities that belonged to him. Her sister Cristina confesses that she is now giving free rein to any type of experimentation. Different sentences, rhythms and languages, but still: “Liliana will always continue to live in my writing“.
