NHCC Book Club: Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza

6:00 – 7:30 pm 

The NHCC invites lovers of literature, folks who love to read, and those who enjoy talking about the history and the vast array of identities that contribute to Latinidad/Hispanidad to join us! We will meet on the fourth Wednesday of every month in the Center’s HLA Conference Room. 

For the month of July, we will be reading Cristina Rivera Garza’s Puliter Prize Winning Memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.

Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.

In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana’s story instead became subsumed into Mexico’s dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana’s case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice.

In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome–but possessive and short-tempered–man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.

Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence–handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints–in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana’s death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is–and what she fights for–today. 

“In this gut-wrenching blend of memoir and reportage, Rivera Garza (No One Will See Me Cry), a Hispanic studies professor at the University of Houston, investigates her younger sister Liliana’s 1990 murder by an abusive ex-boyfriend, who remains at large. Placing her sister’s death in the context of the femicide crisis in Mexico, Rivera Garza interweaves startling facts and statistics (an average of 10 women are killed per day in Mexico) with lyrical meditations on her family life and Liliania’s efforts to break away from her obsessive high school boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos.” (Goodreads) 

This book is available at the Albuquerque Public Library: 2 copies available, plus Kindle ebook and Libby Audiobook 

This is a free community event. Please let us know who will be attending by registering below.