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

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice is a 2021 memoir authored by Cristina Rivera Garza. The book was first published in Spanish and translated into and published in English in 2023. It tells the story of Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20-year-old Mexican architecture student who was strangled by her ex-boyfriend in 1990. Her murderer was never prosecuted. Rivera Garza struggles to revive her sister’s case nearly 30 years later. She applies her skills as a historian and poet to recreate her sister’s life, explain the failures of the Mexican justice system, and highlight femicide’s impact on survivors. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography in 2024 and explores themes of Gendered Violence and Systemic Injustice as Intertwined, Managing Lifelong Grief by Confronting Trauma, and Bearing Witness as Activism.

This guide refers to the 2023 edition published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual violence, rape, pregnancy termination, and gender discrimination.

Summary

Cristina Rivera Garza employs her skills as a historian to reconstruct her sister Liliana’s life, especially her years as a university student in Mexico City. She alternates between this historical narrative and her own quest to reopen her sister’s murder case, which has been dormant for nearly 30 years. 

The book opens with Rivera Garza’s frustrating search for her sister’s case file in 2019. She has appealed to the Mexican attorney general’s office to reopen the case because Liliana’s murderer, an ex-boyfriend named Ángel Gonzalez Ramos, fled and went unprosecuted. She is sent across the city to a variety of offices to continue her search but comes to the realization that Liliana’s file may never be located and resolves to recreate her sister’s case herself. 

Rivera Garza draws on her sister’s archive of notes, poetry, song lyrics, letters, and musings jotted down within class notes to tell her story. She also conducts oral history interviews with Liliana’s friends and family members, including her parents. This methodology allows her to reconstruct a chronology of Liliana’s life from her teen years to her time as an architecture student in Mexico City, where Ángel stalked and killed her. She revisits places where Liliana spent the latter years of her life, including the apartment where she died and the campus of the Metropolitan Autonomous University, which Liliana attended. 

Liliana’s writing in the months before she died is sometimes cryptic and alludes to her desire to be safe and free. They also emphasize her feelings of isolation, which Rivera Garza assesses through the lens of feminist work on intimate partner violence and femicide. Abusers work to isolate their victims to control them. Liliana, however, faced the danger she could not fully comprehend with courage. Rivera Garza concludes, based on oral histories and written evidence, that Liliana broke up with Ángel for the final time shortly before he killed her. She was at her most vulnerable in the place she called her haven—her apartment—where her killer strangled her.

Rivera Garza recounts the grief and shame that enveloped her family when Liliana died. She recalls receiving the news of her sister’s death with shock. She also explains the isolation that her family experienced after Liliana’s murder due to victim blaming and the shame heaped upon families of murdered young women. Liliana’s freedom, however, was not the problem, her father states resolutely: Violent men are the issue. In the end, Rivera Garza frames her memoir as an effort to give Liliana the justice she deserves, centering her voice and allowing Rivera Garza to reconnect with her sister.