Femicide in Mexico reaches staggering proportions

In July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20-year-old architecture student, was strangled to death at her home in a borough of Mexico City. Her suspected killer, Ángel González Ramos, an ex-boyfriend, fled and remained at large. Three decades later, buttressed by a movement protesting against violence towards women, her sister returned to Mexico in the hopes of finding justice.

An acclaimed author and essayist, Cristina Rivera Garza is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Liliana’s Invincible Summer begins with her quest to track down the case files. When the paper trail hits a dead end, she turns her detective work to her sister’s personal archive, motivated to memorialise Liliana in the absence of an institutional record.

Liliana was a prolific writer of letters and notes, lengthy excerpts of which are reproduced in the book. What begins as juvenilia – bits of song lyrics adorned with Hello Kitty stickers – evolves into a portrait of a young woman’s ambitions and inner life. What is to become of me, Liliana wonders in one of her letters. Rivera Garza painstakingly pieces together the fragments to try to reconstruct the years, months, days and even hours that preceded her sister’s murder.

Liliana met González Ramos in middle school, at the gym where she was training as a competitive swimmer. ‘Ángel was such a bother. He doesn’t take no for an answer,’ she complained to a friend. But he took her refusal as ‘a challenge, and stepped up his efforts’. In her first year of high school, Liliana relented, and they began an on-off relationship. At the time of her death, she had broken up with him, but he ‘still insisted that she was his girlfriend’, a friend recalls.

Interviews with family and friends form a chorus of regret. Liliana’s parents’ testimonies are laden with the grief of unbearable loss: her mother recalls how, when pregnant, she bandaged her belly, flanked with rolled towels, to turn the breech baby; her father says that the words the police used to describe his daughter’s life ‘dirty her’.