Read more about the episode here.

Maria Hinojosa: Dear listener, just a quick warning, we’re going to be talking about rape and femicide, so please take care. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: “Having access to this material was such a privilege. It enriched my view of my sister, of my family, of our times together, of Liliana as a student, as a lover, as a friend. And that’s another reason why I’m prone to say, when I talk about the book, that this is not a writing that I did about Liliana, or on Liliana. This is a book that I authored, uh, with her. This is a book written in sisterhood.” 

Cristina Rivera Garza: (MAIN THEME FADES IN) 

Maria Hinojosa: From Futuro Media and PRX, it’s Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today, a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican writer, Cristina Rivera Garza, about finding the words to name gender-based crimes, and why it took her 30 years to write a memoir about her sister’s murder. (MAIN THEME FADES OUT) 

Maria Hinojosa: Cristina Rivera Garza describes herself as a migrant writer. She was born in Matamoros, on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, but for the last 30 years, she’s lived in Houston, Texas. There, she directs the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, which is the first PhD program of its kind in the country. 

Maria Hinojosa: Last year, Cristina won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir for ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer.’ It’s a deeply intimate book where Cristina reconstructs the life of her younger and only sister, Liliana, who was allegedly killed by her ex-boyfriend when she was only 20 years old.

Maria Hinojosa: Her case was never solved. And the alleged perpetrator remains at large. Her memoir is now receiving attention in the United States, but in Mexico, her book’s impact went far beyond the page. It sparked a movement demanding justice for Liliana’s murder and for the hundreds of cases like hers that remain unprosecuted. 

Protesters: “Liliana, Liliana, Liliana, Liliana…” 

Protesters: The Pulitzer isn’t the first award Cristina received. In 2020, she got a MacArthur Genius Grant, and that’s when she began researching her memoir. Cristina then returned to Mexico to explore the emotional archive of her sister Liliana, which essentially had been stored in a box in a closet at her parents’ home since 1990.

Protesters: Cristina opened that box and read through Liliana’s many diaries and letters. She then interviewed and spoke with her own family members and friends after 30 years of silence. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: “Lately, I tend to see her pretty much everywhere I go and I see her traces and just a testimony of how powerful her experience was, not only in my life but in the life of her own community.”

Maria Hinojosa: Cristina has written novels, short stories, poetry, and even an opera. But ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer,’ she says, was the hardest to put on the page. 

Maria Hinojosa: Cristina Rivera Garza and I sat down to talk about confronting gender-based violence through literature. Also, feminism in Mexico and in the United States. And the particular superpower of being bilingual.

Maria Hinojosa: Here’s my conversation with Cristina. 

Maria Hinojosa: Cristina, it is such an honor to have you on Latino USA. Welcome to the show!

Cristina Rivera Garza: Thank you. Thank you for paying attention to my work. 

Maria Hinojosa: Well, it’s, it’s kind of hard not to pay attention to your work. La verdad, Cristina, is that. It’s a little bit strange that both of us, born in Mexico, both of us writers, you’re a writer in the field of memoir and novel, etc., and I’m a journalist and a writer, and then that the both of us, of a similar generation, we’re within five years of each other, would end up receiving a Pulitzer Prize. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: Isn’t that something? 

Maria Hinojosa: Let’s start with you in Mexico. So, you’re born in el Norte de Mexico. Can you just tell me a little bit about growing up?

Cristina Rivera Garza: I was born on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, in fact, in a city called Matamoros. It’s the sister city of Brownsville. My grandparents met in Houston and, uh, they married in Galveston and in the 1930s, right after the 1929 crash, there were these anti-immigrant, uh, policies issued by President Hoover.

Cristina Rivera Garza: And so they were pushed out of the United States and they came back to, to Mexico. And, uh, they lived in this area called El Poblado Anagua, very close to Matamoros. And, uh, that’s where I was born years later. So I’m a fronterizo by birth. Uh, I’m a migrant. I’m the daughter the granddaughter of migrants, and that’s how I define myself a migrant writer. 

Maria Hinojosa: I wonder about this generation of us, Mexicanas. In their 60s, it’s you, it’s me, and then there’s somebody else, right? The president of Mexico. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: That is true. 

Claudia Sheinbaum: “El Pueblo de México, de forma democrática y pacífica, dijo fuerte y claro. Es tiempo de transformación y es tiempo de mujeres.”

Maria Hinojosa: I’m wondering how do you see this generation of Mexicanas who are also border crossers? 

Cristina Rivera Garza: Yeah, absolutely. When, uh, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected as president of Mexico I was reminding everybody that when my mom was born in 1943, she was not allowed to vote in federal elections. So here we are, and we have a woman as a president of Mexico, and that’s quite a change.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I was also reminded of the fact that we went through, uh, A very strong period of mobilizations, feminist mobilizations, both in the 70s in the United States and later on in Mexico and throughout Latin America. (MUSIC FADES IN) I think is the strength of those mobilizations that help explain why people like you and I are doing what we’re doing and why now we have a woman as a president of Mexico.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I think the way in which women in the last 20, 25 years have taken up public space, public language, the way in which they have reclaimed that space in our cultural and social life is absolutely relevant. (MUSIC) 

Maria Hinojosa: You and I, we were also vulnerable as young women in a Mexican society that was still and remains in many ways very machista, very controlling of women, and I’m wondering how you put those two things together because that in the end is part of why you end up writing this book about your sister. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: It seems to me that for a number of years, we as a society, and I personally, as a writer, lacked the kind of language that would allow me to tell these stories, not from the perspective of patriarchy as such, but from the perspective of the victims of the women’s themselves and their families and their communities.

Cristina Rivera Garza: And it took us a number of years, 30 years in my case to be able to gather this language, to understand this language, to tell a story like ‘Liliana’s Invisible Summer’ from Liliana’s point of view. I wanted to do something totally different, but that’s something that took time and the effort of many.

Maria Hinojosa: It’s such an intimate book, Cristina, osea, to be reading the journal entries of your sister. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: Yeah. 

Maria Hinojosa: Obviously. It took you 30 years, essentially, to be able to dive into this emotionally. And I’m thinking about, I was raped as a young woman in Mexico, and it takes years before you’re able to use this word. In my case, I’m a survivor. But in your case, being able to label what happened to your sister, which back then was labeled as a crime of passion. Can you talk about understanding and getting to the point where you had the words to be able to talk about something so horrible and yet so intimate? 

Cristina Rivera Garza: First of all, Maria, thank you for sharing also pieces of your life story.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I think this is very relevant and I’m very sorry that this happened to you. And that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to, to be able to name things and to talk about, to activate an urgent conversation about violence against women. This is something that we all leave, we all have faced, and so one of the reasons why it is so difficult to, to even talk about it is because once we’ve had, we have lacked that language for, for many years, and, and second, uh, patriarchy is not at all interested in us speaking freely about these issues, forcibly silencing these acts of daily violence and the acts of extreme violence like femicide is something that benefits patriarchy and power in general.

Cristina Rivera Garza: (MUSIC FADES IN) And that’s one of the reasons why I really believe that writing it, it could be fiction or nonfiction and, and its capacity of working closely with language is so politically relevant at this point in time. And in my case, uh, in the writing of this book, I, I don’t think I would’ve been able to, to write it, to even think about it without Liliana’s own papers what I’ve been calling now Liliana’s effective archive. Having access to this material was such a privilege. Enriched my view of my sister, of my family, of our times together, of Liliana as a student, as a lover, as a friend. And that’s, uh, that’s another reason why I’m prone to say, when I talk about the book, that this is not a writing that I did about Liliana, or on Liliana, this is a book that I authored, uh, with her. This is a book written in Sisterhood. I guess that’s the reason why it feels so, so intimate. I wanted Liliana to be, uh, the shimmering light in the book at the same time, I didn’t want to leave her alone in the book. So I had to incorporate myself since I was invoking her, I felt a responsibility.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I wanted to be with her. I wanted to join her in this journey back into our times and our streets and our conversations. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: (MUSIC) 

Maria Hinojosa: Coming up on Latino USA, what Cristina Rivera Garza discovered about her sister Liliana while doing research for her memoir. Stay with us. ¡No te vayas! (MUSIC FADES OUT)

Maria Hinojosa: Hey, we’re back. Before the break, Cristina Rivera Garza opened up about the challenges of writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer.’ In the book, she researches the life and the murder of her younger sister. Let’s go back to the conversation. 

Maria Hinojosa: Were it not for her papers, Liliana’s papers, you would not have this work.

Maria Hinojosa: But then you did this journalistic endeavor. You went and you interviewed all of her close friends, your parents, your own family. And I wonder if they said, ‘Ay, Cristina, no. Are you really going to do this?’ And so what it took for you to say, ‘yes, no, I’m, I’ve got to do this.’ 

Cristina Rivera Garza: When I finally was brave enough to open up those boxes where I knew we had stored Liliana’s belongings, the overwhelming sensation was that Liliana was surrounding me, that she was there with me.

Cristina Rivera Garza: And that’s when I got to think that, uh, I was touching the pieces of paper, the ink that Liliana had placed there 30 years prior, and her touch was the last right there on those documents. What I imagined at that point, and this is not just some magical realism explanation or some neo agey thing, it was like a material sensation.

Cristina Rivera Garza: So I’m placing my hand where Liliana placed hers, and these papers have been untouched for 30 years. It took me days, perhaps weeks, just to be able to phrase what had, uh, happened when I opened those boxes. It was then that I knew I had a book. Um, I had tried to write this book a couple of times, uh, and I was never able to do it. I didn’t know why, I just knew that these manuscripts were no good. But then when I was so close, you know, physically close to the material, then I knew this is it. This is what I’ve been lacking all these years. I needed Liliana’s own voice. (MUSIC FADES IN) I didn’t need to create, to forge this voice in a fiction type of structure.

Cristina Rivera Garza: Liliana was careful enough throughout her life to preserve her voice and to keep all those materials in these boxes. So once I got there, I then decided that I needed to have more information. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: We are members of complex communities. We are made by others and unmade often too by others. So I needed to have those perspectives from friends and old classmates.

Cristina Rivera Garza: Fortunately, Maria, they were so generous. I had not remained in touch with them for 30 years. All of them, uh, it was as though they were expecting the phone call, that they’ve been waiting for that phone call for a long time. And the only thing that I mentioned at the beginning was that I wanted to see if they could gift me with a memory of my sister.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I didn’t ask for specifics. I just wanted the memory that I had. for them encapsulated my sister’s connection with them. And that’s how we created, or the book was able to forge this community that surrounded Liliana, that shaped in many ways, Liliana’s life. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: (MUSIC FADES OUT) 

Maria Hinojosa: so, Cristina, your sister was so young when she was murdered. She was only 20 years old and yet she was incredibly prolific and filled with passion. Um, but here you are, her older sister, who obviously you had a very tight relationship, but now you’re reading all of this work. What did you realize about Liliana that you didn’t know?

Cristina Rivera Garza: There was quite an age difference between both of us, five years. So we never shared friends, for example. And what we did together, though, was swimming in the same swimming team in Toluca. I grew up believing that I was the one interested in literature and writing, and that Liliana, on the other hand, was more passionate about visual arts and architecture, but I didn’t know how voracious a reader she was.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I didn’t know that she was, uh, such a writer. The letters that I read indicate to me that Liliana was not only expressing herself, we are all are prone to do when we are young, but she was playing very intentionally with form as well. And Liliana’s capacity of love, I think is something that every single friend that I talked to confirmed, and that’s something that I always felt. I think I’ve been able to go through this life with this kind of a shield in front of me, knowing that I was loved, uh, completely. Uh, no questions asked that I was loved in such a profound way. And having that as an experience that you’ve gone through at an early age, I think protects you.

Cristina Rivera Garza: I knew my parents loved me, but that’s expected. Although sadly is not always the case, but having a sister, someone that I had disagreements with, and fights with, of course, but knowing that her love was so profound and so truthful, I think that that protected me against pretty much everything and allowed me to grow up, to evolve more freely, too.

Maria Hinojosa: I love the fact that you’re talking about this love from your younger sister as being so central in your life. (MUSIC) So, your book is published at a time when femicides, which is the murder of women because of their gender…

Cristina Rivera Garza: That’s correct.

Maria Hinojosa: Are high in Mexico. The word impunity is always the next word after femicide. Your sister’s case, in fact, remains unsolved. The alleged killer remains at large. And of course, the thing is, it’s not just happening in Mexico. But in Mexico. We have a name for it, right? Because here in the United States, three women are killed every day by an intimate partner, and femicide isn’t even codified in our laws, while in Mexico, it is. So it’s a terrible thing, but at least you have a word for it.

Maria Hinojosa: And in many ways, Liliana probably never imagined that she would become a symbol for this particular word. Femicidio, feminicidio, uh, femicide. So, Cristina, are you hoping to have some kind of an impact on this massive issue of femicide in Mexico with such an intimate book? 

Cristina Rivera Garza: Something that we have to keep in mind about writing books, and I’m sure you know these, is that we have, we may have as authors specific intentions, things that we want to accomplish.

Cristina Rivera Garza: But fortunately, I think books end up doing whatever books want to do. And this is because readers embrace books or reject books. So I was not expecting such a generous embrace. I was not thinking about docents and hundreds of young women marching on the street and remembering Liliana, chanting her name, claiming for justice, not only for Liliana, but for all women who we’ve lost to gender violence.

Cristina Rivera Garza: So all these things, I was not expecting them. I am absolutely grateful that they are happening, of course, because I do believe there is, at least in Mexico, and I think in the Spanish speaking world, in Latin America. There is a very dynamic conversation about gender violence. 

Protesters: “Se nos busca por nacer, y nuestro castigo es la violencia que no ves..” 

Cristina Rivera Garza: Feminism has become, in my view, the moral compass, the real opposition in many cases to governments that pay very little attention to women’s suffering and to gender violence specifically, but not so much in the English-speaking world, not in the United States. Every time that I mentioned the word femicide, uh, people kind of turn, uh, they hesitate.

Cristina Rivera Garza: When I enunciate the word femicide, people think that I can’t speak really good English because these are terms that are not, uh, in use in our daily life. And they should, because gender violence, specifically violence against women and femicide, are part of our daily life in the United States, at least.

Cristina Rivera Garza: And so I, I really, I would hope that ‘Liliana’s Invisible Summer,’ the English version of this book, um, could activate an urgent conversation. We should be able to name things the right way and hopefully protect in that way women in our midst and above all, the next generations, younger women deserve to be able to name what sometimes is so difficult to even pinpoint.

Cristina Rivera Garza: And that’s one of the difficulties about femicide and gender violence, that they are so intertwined with the language of romantic love that sometimes it’s difficult to set them apart, to see which one is which. I do believe that if we start to talk openly, compassionately about these issues, many lives could be saved.

Maria Hinojosa: So you come to do your PhD in history, but then you actually devote your time to writing novels. For you, thinking and writing, both in English and in Spanish, is a statement about your life and again, another similarity the both of us see this as a kind of political act. And with this book, you actually ended up translating yourself from Spanish to English, which, um, I cannot even imagine, but you went further because it wasn’t just translating the words on paper.

Maria Hinojosa: And it’s really fascinating that you’re pushing this notion of bilingualism and the power of bilingualism as a writer. Because I always felt it was my weakness. I’ve always thought I’m less of a writer because I’m not perfectly good in Spanish and I’m not perfectly good in English. And so talk to us about what I call now our superpower, right?

Cristina Rivera Garza: (LAUGHS) It is a superpower. Definitely. Um, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I was doing this for this book and not for other books, because I’ve been publishing my books, which I’ve written in Spanish, uh, from within the United States, and I’ve been publishing them in Spanish. But for this specific book, I found myself writing in Spanish, which kind of came naturally to me, but some other mornings, I was surprised by the fact that I started to write in English.

Cristina Rivera Garza: And, uh, instead of limiting or trying to change that reaction, I decided to just, uh, to let it go. to see what it would take me. The next day or a couple of days after that, I would revise what I had written before using the opposite language. And then it became kind of a method… 

Maria Hinojosa: That sounds Ridiculously painful. Te juro. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: It’s painful and very slow. 

Maria Hinojosa: Oh my God, that sounds painful and scary. It sounds like writer torture. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: Exactly. And very incredibly slow too. But then, thinking about why would I submit myself to this, then I’ve come up with this answer. I think that English allowed me a protection, uh, emotionally, uh, that Spanish was not able to give me, uh, writing some of these, uh, events that I lived in Spanish, writing them in English now, uh, I think allowed me, uh, a sort of necessary distance in terms of the writing process. Uh, obviously this is, this art matters very close to my heart. That’s the reason why I think this book was, was written in that way. 

Maria Hinojosa: Cristina, the way you write about your sister’s life being snuffed out for being a woman who just wanted to be free. And yet at the end of your book, you bring it really into this very intimate place. The fact that you were swimmers and I’m wondering if you can talk to us about if you’re still swimming, where you’re swimming, how you’re swimming, and what’s happening to you as you swim. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: The swimming pool is a place where I meet my sister. When I met her when she was alive because we belong to the same team, And what I see her, what I feel her now in, uh, in all the swimming pools that I’ve been swimming, uh, both in the United States and Mexico. (MUSIC FADES IN) My parents enrolled us in this swimming team because they wanted us to have something to do. And then it became more than just a sport.

Cristina Rivera Garza: It was a way of getting to a place, an inner place that I shared with my sister in, in that sense. But that is also very intimate and very true, right? And I need tons of that for writing. So that’s the connection that I see between the two.

Cristina Rivera Garza: (MUSIC) 

Maria Hinojosa: Cristina, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for all of your work and for believing in your voice and for, for making your sister unforgettable, um, in the book ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer’ and for making us all fall in love with her, she should be here with us. 

Cristina Rivera Garza: She is here with us. 

Maria Hinojosa: After the interview, we asked Cristina to read a passage from the last chapter of her memoir, ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer.’

Cristina Rivera Garza: “I have said on numerous occasions that one swims to be alone, but that’s only half true. Sometimes, it is necessary to go alone to swim by oneself, next to no one, in order to join a communion in the water. In geology, residence time is a concept used to measure the duration of persistence of a substance or a portion of material or a body in a specific location, such as the ocean, earth, or the atmosphere. It could be water in a pool. Sodium, for example, has a residence time of 260 million years. Liliana will reside here. With me as long as I plunged into the water when I stroke and kick and breathe in becomes fleshed memory.”

Cristina Rivera Garza: (MUSIC FADES OUT). (MAIN THEME) 

Maria Hinojosa: Today’s show was produced by Mitzy Pineda and edited by Marta Martínez. It was mixed by Julia Caruso with engineering support from JJ Querubin.. The Latino USA team also includes Roxana Aguirre, Fernanda Echavarri, Jessica Ellis, Victoria Estrada, Dominique Hinestrosa, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., Stephanie Lebow Andrea López-Cruzado, Luis Luna, Tasha Sandoval, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo, Penile Ramírez, Marlon Bishop, Maria Garcia, and myself, our co-executive producers.

Maria Hinojosa: I’m your host, Maria Hinojosa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I’ll see you on social media and remember. ¡No te vayas! 

Stephanie Lebow: Latino USA is made possible in part by The Heising-Simons Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. More at hsfoundation.org 

Stephanie Lebow: Skyline Foundation and W. K. Kellogg Foundation. A partner with communities, where children come first.