Liliana’s invincible summer

On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico’s dark and relentless history of femicide. She was a 20-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: She would leave him behind and start a new life. She would do a master’s degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him. Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost.