Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

“Can you enjoy life while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.”

Rivera Garza interrogates the coexistence of pleasure and pain. She wonders if someone in mourning can enjoy the daily pleasures of life, like a good meal with a friend, while grieving a loss like hers. This develops the theme of Managing Lifelong Grief by Confronting Trauma, with Rivera Garza’s word choice highlighting not only the durability of grief (it is an “eternity”) but also its repetitive nature (the same thoughts arise repeatedly).

“My body begins to freeze over as it dawns on me that, without this file, the institutional trace of my sister’s life will be lost forever. Without this file I am after, her experience on earth will be as good as nothing.”

Rivera Garza fears that her sister’s story and memory will vanish if the Mexican authorities cannot locate her decades-old case file. This realization inspires her memoir, which celebrates Liliana’s life and serves as symbolic justice: She gifts her sister the justice that the authorities failed to secure.

“It is a lie that time passes. Time is stuck.”

Liliana’s family tends to her grave, where she has spent more years than those she lived. She remains forever 20 years old while everyone else has aged, yet time is also “stuck” for them in the sense that their grief remains, suspending them in time.

“She knew well, albeit instinctively, that writing was a distance-demolishing technology. She craved closeness, camaraderie, trust.”

Liliana preserved letters, notes, copies of lyrics, and poetry. Rivera Garza’s transcription of these writings, which date back to her teenage years, characterizes Liliana as a young woman of deep feeling who loved her friends and family and used correspondence to bring her loved ones into her presence despite distance. Implicitly, the idea of writing as a “distance-demolishing technology” comments on the purpose of Rivera Garza’s memoir, which seeks to connect with readers’ emotions and inspire action.

“What do you do with the possessions of the dead? How do you account for the touch they preserve, their smell, the infinitesimal particles that cling to fabric or chipped wood?”

Rivera Garza’s family stored Liliana’s possessions and writing, which went unopened for years. Via a series of rhetorical questions, she ponders how people should approach materials that are relics preserving links to lost loved ones. The implication is that the tangibility of these objects can bring comfort by filling the void of physical loss, yet they simultaneously remind one of this loss.

“We were a volatile sovereign republic of four inhabitants, requiring so little from the outside world.”

Liliana’s family was tightly knit, needing little from others. Their unwillingness to allow Ángel into their home illustrates this closeness and impenetrable “sovereignty.” Yet Liliana’s femicide devastated this “republic,” causing her family to turn further inward to protect their grief.

“Barely concealed in a Hallmark card, ready to jump at her, Ángel’s ‘I’ rushed out from the card to hit Liliana’s eyes. His ‘I,’ not his love, was both the medium and the message.”

Rivera Garza finds a Valentine’s Day card that Ángel gave to Liliana early in their relationship among the items in her archive. The card’s tone is illustrative of his selfishness, as the inside of the card projects and centers “I,” the individual, rather than love for the recipient; the pun on the homophones “I” and “eye” underscores this by substituting Ángel’s self-absorption for a figurative form of eye contact. Overall, the language and tone of the card are metaphors for his violence.

“Did we have a chance to discuss our own loneliness as we briefly coexisted and then grew apart in Mexico City? Were we still talking, as we once did, about love?”

Rivera Garza’s memories of her brief time living with Liliana in Mexico City are bittersweet. She regrets the distance that grew between them as their lives changed. She strives to recall what they talked about and if they continued to have the same deep conversations they had when living together at home in Toluca.

“I sensed her hand behind the invitation that I had accepted, some six months earlier, to teach an intensive course at UNAM Casa Azul in the beginning of 2020 […] Living in grief is this: never being alone.”

Rivera Garza seeks communion with Liliana throughout her memoir. One day in 2020, shortly after she reveals to her parents that she is trying to reopen Liliana’s case, a biker reaches out to hand her money while she walks the Harrisburg Trail near her Houston residence. She attributes this act, like others in her life, to Liliana’s spirit. Her sister’s memory is a constant companion, and this paradox—that losing a person can make one less “alone”—adds nuance to the memoir’s depiction of grief.

“Despite the apparent chaos in her life, there was an order beneath it all. Sometimes I would watch her walk through the hallways and I would say to myself: there goes a free woman.”

Liliana’s friends were aware of Ángel’s disturbing presence in her life. Yet a theme that consistently emerges from Rivera Garza’s interviews, and through her analysis of Liliana’s writing, is freedom. Liliana prized her freedom above all, which explains why Ángel killed her. She was trying to liberate herself from his abuse, which he could not tolerate.

“Liliana was the name I gave to my freedom.”

Liliana’s friend Ana Ocadiz thinks of youthful freedom and joy when she remembers her friendship with Liliana. She associates the liberation of youth with Liliana so much that she merges Liliana’s name with her definition of freedom, which serves as a way of simultaneously honoring Liliana and keeping her memory alive—a form of Bearing Witness as Activism.

“Liliana, on the other hand, loved life, the street, cinema, her friends, architecture, Manolo, me, even Ángel. That was her superpower; and that, too, was her Achilles’ heel.”

Liliana’s friends confirm the evidence from her archive in their interviews; she loved life and all its pleasures. Her love for others, however, could overpower her. Ana sees her ability to love as extraordinary and admirable, yet this characteristic also made Liliana vulnerable to manipulation and abuse.

“She was, or seemed to be, going steady with Manolo, but Ángel still insisted that she was his girlfriend. I never witnessed any violence between them.”

Liliana’s friend Norma Xavier Quintana remembers Ángel’s threatening presence on the fringes of Liliana’s life. Near the end of Liliana’s life, she broke up with him and embarked on a new relationship, but he stalked her, eventually causing a fissure in her budding romance with Manolo.

“That day I understood that Liliana was not free.”

Ángel consistently inserted himself into Liliana’s life even when he was not invited. He stalked her on campus and at home. He grew jealous of her new friendships in Mexico City and frequently appeared from Toluca to track her movements. He was never part of her close inner circle, however. He was a stalker who limited Liliana’s freedom.

“I knew Liliana didn’t want to have a boyfriend. She was adamant about it.”

Liliana’s university classmate Raúl pursued her romantically. The two alternated between getting closer and Liliana distancing herself from him. She was reluctant to enter a new relationship after enduring Ángel’s controlling, abusive behavior, insisting on preserving her freedom. That Ángel’s shadow impacted her interactions with others, even when she had split up with him, demonstrates another way in which he continued to circumscribe her life.

“I saw Ángel on campus only once but I made out his shadow down the street from Liliana’s house quite often. He was like a ghost. A black cloud. You didn’t need to see him to know he was there.”

Liliana dated classmate Manolo Casillas Espina in the months before her death, although Ángel’s unwanted reappearance in her life caused them to split up. He remembers Ángel as a menacing presence who stalked Liliana, sometimes literally appearing in shadows as he watched her every move, limiting the freedom she desperately craved.

“[T]here was Liliana who, as much as she turned the world upside down, could not find the words to name the violence that followed her closely.”

Rivera Garza’s analysis of Liliana’s writing suggests that she struggled to comprehend the violence she endured and to comprehend the danger that Ángel posed to her life. She did not comprehend that someone who claimed to love her could also end her life, but the memoir names the problem for her in a symbolic act of restitution.

“The temptation to build Liliana’s life as a defenseless victim, powerless before the overwhelming force of the predator, was great. That is why I prefer that she speak for herself here in these pages: I can sense that, at every turn of the road, even in the darkest moments, Liliana did not lose the ability to see herself as the author of her own life.”

Rivera Garza avoids silencing Liliana, centering Liliana’s voice by weaving her words into the text. She shows her sister as a woman of agency who sought to extricate herself from her abuser’s control.

“Her desire for a different life, for a different love, was becoming a conviction.”

Rivera Garza sees strength in the words that Liliana wrote in the weeks before her death, countering common narratives of those who experience abuse as passive. She found the courage to end her relationship with Ángel with finality and longed to enter a new era of freedom, determined to control her life and future. The shift from “desire” to “conviction” underscores Liliana’s growing self-confidence, making her fate all the more tragic.

“Liliana had a hard time believing that a lover could make an attempt on her life. Wasn’t she, after all, such an ingrained part of his life that any threat against her ought to necessarily turn into a threat against himself?”

Song lyrics that Liliana transcribed into a notebook shortly before her death allude to the circumstances in which she found herself. Ángel reappeared in her life despite her insistence that they were no longer a couple. The lyrics in question state that one cannot kill a person they love because their lover is another version of themselves. The passage illustrates how romantic ideals can serve to mask abuse—another way in which Liliana’s death reflects systemic failures.

“Someone must enter the seven-digit number to make the first phone call. Someone must pronounce the words, carefully. Someone observes the tension that holds the cord in place between the telephone base and the handset. The tight distance between the two. Someone must deliver the news, which in turn, will emerge from another black handset.”

Rivera Garza remembers receiving word of Liliana’s death from the Mexican consulate in Houston and arranging to travel home, notify others, and plan her sister’s funeral. She refers to herself as “someone” instead of in the first person to convey the shock and out-of-body experience that such violent tragedy can inspire, implying that she mechanically went through necessary motions while struggling to absorb the news. The use of sentence fragments further underscores this impression.

“Crying is a civilized act. But what happens there, in that room, is quite beyond the here and now of civilization.”

Rivera Garza recalls her grief after burying Liliana. She went into her sister’s childhood bedroom, where she let out guttural wails of grief that she suggests cannot be described as “crying.” Her grief was animalistic, raw, and practically indescribable, highlighting how Liliana’s death changed her loved ones’ lives forever.

“I gave Liliana, and you, a lot of freedom. I have always believed in freedom because only in freedom can we know what we are made of. Freedom is not the problem. Men are the problem—violent, arrogant, and murderous men.”

Rivera Garza’s father comments on Liliana’s freedom, which she wrote about and to which her friends frequently refer in their interviews. Whereas a patriarchal society may cast women’s behavior—e.g., engaging in sexual relationships outside of marriage—as the source of men’s violence, Liliana’s father counters that freedom is a right. He then explicitly identifies patriarchal violence as the cause of Liliana’s death.