A couple of days ago I woke up to the news that the mexican writer, Cristina Rivera Garza he won Pulitzer Prize, an award given by Columbia University and that recognizes excellence in journalism and literature. Our compatriot was recognized in the category of “a distinguished and objective memoir or autobiography” for her book The invincible summer of Liliana.
If you remember, my last column was intended to be a picture of violence, and instead of using brushes, I transcribed paragraphs from several books, among them, those of the aforementioned book, which also received the 2021 award. Xavier Villaurrutia Writers Award for Writers.
He book is about the unfortunate fate that it got his younger sister Liliana Rivera Garzaa architecture student at UNAMthat lost his life at twenty years old on July 16, 1990 at the hands of her boyfriend Ángel González Ramos, fugitive of justice since then.
From the author’s first reactions I rescue the following: Guessing what her sister would have felt knowing that she received the pulitzer: “Liliana would be very happy.” When classifying the type of violence: “Intimate couple terrorism”. When defining the motive for the crime: “His decision was that she would not have a life without him”…
These phrases, which point out an act as ominous as the feminicideare images that finish drawing gender violence.
I propose to continue paraphrasing the author, but first, I share with you the list of concepts that I found, when in my reading workshop we read Liliana’s invincible summer: guilt, death, murder, machismo, human nature, freedom, abuse, pregnancy, abortion, infidelity, breakup, and many others that accompany pain.
This atrocious story was built from the awareness that in the 1990s there was no language to name feminicides. Furthermore, she reminds us that adolescent diaries compensate for the need to put in black and white what one feels while growing up: “Neither Liliana, nor those of us who loved her, had at our disposal a language that would allow us to identify danger signs. That blindnesswhich was never voluntary, but socialhas contributed to murder of hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico and in the world. As Snyder has argued in No Visible Bruises, what we did not know about domestic violence, about intimate or partner terrorism, at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, in a country where violence against women was alarmingly increasing, one night he invaded my sister’s home in Azcapotzalco, placed a pillow over her face, and took her life.”
Two days after celebrating our mothers, I wonder: How many daughters would Liliana have had and would their reality have been worse or the same as what she had? Yes, her, whom her sister perceived as “half philosopher, half writer, half crazy… smart and luminous, the reliable and sometimes protective friend, the young girl, talkative and mocking…”. Cristina was convinced that her sister “loved life, the street, the cinema, her friends, architecture, Manolo, me, even Ángel. That was her super power; and that, too, was her Achilles heel.
Long live literature, because among other things, it shows social wounds and reveals human pain!
I hope that justice finds Ángel González Ramos.
More from the same author:
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