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’.
The family wonders if they had missed any warning signs, and the father is racked by guilt that he couldn’t afford the bribe demanded by the attorney general’s office to pursue the investigation. According to Jacquelyn Campbell, a nursing academic who studies domestic violence, contrary to the commonly held perception that murderous men just ‘snap’, intimate partner violence often follows a pattern. González Ramos exhibited several of the 22 risk factors Campbell has identified: possession of a firearm, violence, extreme jealousy, stalking and suicidal threats. Danger spikes when a victim attempts to leave.
Rivera Garza laments:
Neither Liliana nor those of us who loved her had at our disposal the insight, the language, 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.
Femicide is a global phenomenon, but the stats for Mexico are staggering: ten women or girls are killed every day on average. Despite a growing awareness of the problem, there are no signs of improvement, and the majority of the crimes go unpunished.
Although the author’s legal mission stalled, her persistence did yield a breakthrough. Alongside the book’s publication in Spanish in 2021, she publicised an email account in the hope of leads. She received a tip that Ángel had been living in southern California under an assumed name and had drowned in 2020. The birthdate and photographs of the deceased, and the surnames of people writing on a memorial website, seemed to confirm matters. Rivera Garza wondered at first if Ángel had faked his death in order to evade arrest. If he had died, he would never be brought to justice, and only the truth and memory would be left as acts of restitution, she wrote in El País.
Unlike her previous books – written in Spanish and translated by others – Rivera Garza has chosen to write both the Spanish and English versions of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, feeling responsible for ‘the enunciation of every single word’. The lyrical prose, as she retraces her sister’s steps through Mexico City with its bougainvillea and poplar trees, is interjected with news reports and bureaucratic correspondence. The officialese brings to mind Natasha Trethewey’s 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive, which chillingly quotes the police record of her stepfather’s murder of her mother.
Femicides used to be called ‘crimes of passion’, with women blamed for bringing violence upon themselves. (Recent high-profile headlines in the UK suggest that not much has changed.) Having shared the tip about Ángel’s suspected alias with the district attorney’s office, who promised to confirm his identity, a year and a half later Rivera Garza still has no news. ‘Only silence. The bleak, one might say eternal, silence of impunity.’
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