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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, physical abuse, and gender discrimination.

Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, Liliana, experienced gendered violence beginning in her teen years and culminating in her femicide at the hands of Ángel Gonzalez Ramos in 1990 when she was 20 years old. The memoir centers, to a large extent, on reconstructing the course that this relationship took and exploring the societal context in which it unfolded. In doing so, Rivera Garza argues that violence against women in intimate relationships reflects and feeds off of a broader culture of misogyny, which has profound consequences for both women and their loved ones.

Liliana herself is the primary example. Liliana’s writing reveals details and raises questions about her years spent experiencing Ángel’s violence while trying to liberate herself. She struggled to find the language to define it because there was little public discourse about intimate partner violence during her life: Femicides were not classified as gendered violence, and women’s murders by abusive partners were deemed crimes of passion. What little discussion there was often blamed women for the violence they suffered, accusing them of “leading men on” or attributing their deaths to the fact that they were sexually active.