Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza has lived in Houston, Texas for the past 30 years, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. Since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir with “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” in 2024, her work has gained significant recognition in the U.S.

Read the episode transcript here.

Before the Pulitzer, Rivera Garza’s memoir had already become a symbol in Mexico, sparking a movement for women’s rights. In the book, she explores and shares the “emotional archive” of her younger sister, Liliana, who was allegedly murdered in 1990 by her boyfriend when she was only 20 years old. 

At the time, the crime was qualified as a “crime of passion,” due to a lack of language to properly name it. Today, in Mexico, the term “femicide” is used legally to describe the murder of women because of their gender, which has helped bring justice to many victims of this type of violence.

However, Liliana’s murder was never solved. The alleged perpetrator remains at large, and, after all these years, the official case file has been erased from the Mexican justice system. That’s why Cristina decided to write her memoir from her sister’s perspective, using Liliana’s old diaries and letters and returning to Mexico to speak with her own family and her sister’s friends 30 years after the crime. Cristina describes this work as “a book written in sisterhood.”

In conversation with María Hinojosa, they reflect on finding the right words to start a conversation about gender-based violence both in Mexico and the U.S.

Featured image courtesy of Cristina Rivera Garza.

Produced by Mitzi Pineda and edited by Marta Martinez. It was mixed by Julia Caruso.