Liliana's Invincible Summer

September 1, 2022

In 1990 Mexico, Rivera Garza's sister was murdered by a former boyfriend and the crime brushed aside by an indifferent criminal justice system. Here, the MacArthur-graced novelist/poet peers deeply at her own long-standing grief while reigniting the brief, beautiful flame of Liliana's life, which she reconstructs through letters, school notebooks, and police reports she collected on a trip to Mexico after decades in the United States.

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December 12, 2022
In this gut-wrenching blend of memoir and reportage, Rivera Garza (No One Will See Me Cry), a Hispanic studies professor at the University of Houston, investigates her younger sister Liliana’s 1990 murder by an abusive ex-boyfriend, who remains at large. Placing her sister’s death in the context of the femicide crisis in Mexico, Rivera Garza interweaves startling facts and statistics (an average of 10 women are killed per day in Mexico) with lyrical meditations on her family life and Liliania’s efforts to break away from her obsessive high school boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos. Liliana’s oft-repeated desire not to be left alone haunts the narrative, as do Rivera Garza’s guilt and shame over her sister’s death. Documenting the meticulous detective work of recreating the years and months leading up to Liliana’s murder, Rivera Garcia interweaves case files and newspaper accounts with excerpts from Liliana’s teenage diary, where the early warning signs about Ángel appear. Thoughout, Rivera Garza laments how she and Liliana’s friends lacked “the insight, the language, that would allow us to identify the signs of danger,” and explores “how patriarchy deforms and hurts men, as much as it does women.” This piercing remembrance hits home.

December 15, 2022
A true-crime book that creates a distressing portrayal of gendered violence in Mexico. In her latest book, MacArthur fellow Rivera Garza, a professor of Hispanic studies and creative writing at the University of Houston, delivers a cleareyed portrait of her sister, who was murdered in Azcapotzalco, Mexico, on July 16, 1990. The author chronicles how she visited Mexico in 2019 in search of her sister's unresolved criminal file, and she brings us into her world with accounts of Liliana's summer, including letters, notebooks, and personal narratives from family and friends. In one brief passage, Rivera Garza provides revealing insight into the gender dynamics of her sister's life. A friend recalls: "Lili wanted out of this relationship, but couldn't. The guy was very persistent. She was, or seemed to be, going steady with Manolo, but �ngel still insisted that she was his girl-friend. I never witnessed any violence between them." As the author shows, many of the men in Liliana's orbit considered women mere possessions. The narrative is full of a wide variety of characters whose common tie is Liliana, and the author knits all of the stories together with aplomb. Her skilled storytelling movingly depicts the last days of her sister's life within the context of the continued plague of femicide. "With the care of the archaeologist who touches without damaging, who dusts without breaking, my intention is to open and preserve [my sister's writing] at the same time: de- and recon-textualize it in a reading from the present," writes the author. "Neither Liliana nor those of us who loved her had at our disposal the insight, the lan-guage, that would allow us to identify the signs of danger. This blindness, which was never voluntary but social, has contributed to the murder of hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico and beyond." A moving, heart-wrenching memoir as well as an unflinching appraisal of the widespread violence against women in Mexico.

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