Cristina Rivera Garza Is Writing for Justice

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Cristina Rivera Garza believes that all books are personal, but she says her latest, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, “comes with a wound that is still open.” Rivera Garza’s sister Liliana was 20 years old when she was murdered in 1990 in her native Mexico. An arrest warrant was filed for the primary suspect, Liliana’s ex-boyfriend, but he absconded and the case fell apart. In her genre-defying memoir, Rivera Garza, now 59, sets out on a quest to track down her sister’s case file and finally find the man who killed her. She hopes that the book, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, furthers the global conversation about gender violence and particularly about femicide, when a woman is murdered because of her gender.

Mexico started recognizing femicide as a crime in the penal code in 2012. Rivera Garza attributes landmark laws like that, as well as Mexico’s establishment of an office specifically devoted to femicide in the general prosecutor’s office, to the feminist mobilization efforts led by younger generations of women. “I would not have been able to write Liliana’s Invisible Summer without the language that these movements have coined over the last 10, 20 years,” she says.

When Rivera Garza set out to write the book, she was mostly focused on seeking the legal definition of justice for her sister. But the deeper she researched and the longer she waited, the closer she felt to other families going through the same experiences and the more she realized that she was participating in other forms of justice that were just as relevant and important as whatever she might get from the penal system. It is critical, she was reminded, that women lost to violence are recognized as full human beings rather than grim statistics. “Restorative justice is a process,” she says. “It’s never-ending, and it involves the participation in the production of this collective memory.”

Rivera Garza also navigated the relationship between grief and translation while writing Liliana. “I think English proved to be a kind of buffer with the experience that I was trying to explore,” she says. “I experienced the loss of my sister in a different language. Writing the story, or sections of the story in English, allowed me a certain kind of protection.” 

Fresh off a writer’s residency in Berlin, Rivera Garza is currently running a Ph.D. program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. She considers the program, the first of its kind in the U.S., to be a kind of activism for devoting more resources to translated works and for the Spanish language. The second most-spoken language in the U.S. still needs its champions.