Liliana's Invincible Summer
Liliana's Invincible Summer
Part I: Azcapotzalco
Overview
The streets of Mexico City pulse with contradictions, where the polished facades of La Condesa give way to the raw energy of Doctores, mirroring the tension between surface illusions and hidden violence. Here, grief loops like a cursed carousel, as the narrator’s search for her sister Liliana’s case file collides with institutional indifference—a labyrinth of crumbling offices, vanished records, and officials who wield apathy like armor. Walls scarred by feminist protests whisper names: Lesvy, Liliana, countless others erased by a system that treats femicide as routine.
Mythology bleeds into the mundane. Azcapotzalco, the “place of anthills,” becomes a haunting metaphor. Ants—ancient guides to the underworld—crawl through the narrator’s psyche, embodying grief’s relentless gnaw. Meanwhile, bureaucracy enacts its own violence: misplaced files, shredded evidence, and digital voids where lives once existed. A secretary’s shrug—“records don’t live forever”—echoes like a verdict, exposing how state systems discard marginalized histories. Yet, in this erasure, defiance takes root.
The narrative thrums with language as resistance—the belated legal recognition of femicide dismantling old lies of “crimes of passion,” protests chanting “It wasn’t her fault” into the teeth of impunity. Even a traffic jam morphs into revelation: if institutions fail, survivors must build their own archives, weaponizing memory against oblivion. Personal rituals—tending a grave, sharing candy with a stranger—become acts of solidarity, stitching private sorrow into collective rage.
Through chance encounters—a professor accused of harassment fleeing recognition, a father’s futile hoe striking earth—the story unmasks normalized cruelty. Yet, in the rubble of broken systems, resilience flickers: a silent toast toppling patriarchy, glitter smeared on courthouse walls, a sister’s vow to resurrect what time and power tried to bury. The city’s chaos, its sirens and silences, becomes a chorus: ten femicides daily, yes, but also ten thousand rebellions.
The Weight of Memory and Bureaucracy
A Walk Through Contradictions
The narrator and Sorais traverse Mexico City’s neighborhoods, moving from the affluent, tree-lined streets of La Condesa—a former horse-racing track turned hipster haven—to the gritty, chaotic energy of Doctores. The journey mirrors the contrast between the city’s glossy veneer and its undercurrents of violence. Conversations about feminist movements and academic scandals punctuate their walk, grounding their personal quest in a broader social context. The streets themselves feel like a metaphor: the circular Avenida Amsterdam, likened to a “physical villanelle,” evokes the endless loop of grief and unresolved justice.
Inside the Labyrinth
At the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office, bureaucracy becomes a character in its own right. The narrator navigates a maze of departments, red labels, and dispassionate officials. A fleeting moment of hope—a printer whirring to life—dissolves when the document proves to be another dead end. The process is laden with coded dismissals: “It is very unusual to actually find it.” The exchange highlights institutional indifference, where files older than decades slip through cracks widened by apathy.
Feminist Footprints
The building’s walls bear witness to recent feminist protests. A memorial for Lesvy Berlin Rivera Osorio—a student murdered by her boyfriend—haunts the space. The narrator draws parallels between Lesvy and Liliana: their shared birthdate, their silenced voices. The “glitter revolution,” sparked by a defiant act of throwing glitter at officials, symbolizes both rage and resilience. These layers of protest—past and present—merge, as the narrator steps into the footprints of women who’ve stood here before, demanding justice in a system built to erase them.
The Ghosts of Impunity
Interactions with clerks and security guards underscore the normalized cruelty of bureaucracy. A photocopy request becomes a Sisyphean task; a red label feels like a brand. The narrator’s question—“Can I reopen the case?”—hangs in the air, met with evasive legalisms. The subtext is clear: time favors the perpetrators. Yet, the act of seeking the file itself defies this logic, a refusal to let Liliana’s story dissolve into Mexico’s “trail of heartbreak pierced by impunity.”
Echoes Across Time
The day’s journey ends with a meal near the Alameda Central, the city’s chaos swirling outside. The narrator observes Sorais, her ally in this quest, and wonders about her unspoken thoughts. The unresolved tension mirrors the broader narrative: a sister’s death, a system’s failure, and the quiet, daily courage of women navigating a world where “ten femicides occur every single day.” The search for the file becomes a act of love—and rebellion—against erasure.
The Weight of Bureaucracy
The journey to Agency 22 in Azcapotzalco begins with a disorienting mix of hope and bureaucratic absurdity. A policewoman mistakes the narrator for Liliana, her murdered sister—a moment that blurs identity and grief. Redirected to Agency 40, the pair navigate a labyrinth of crumbling offices, indifferent officials, and a system that seems designed to erase rather than preserve. The physical decay of the building mirrors the institutional neglect: yellowed walls, broken benches, and a sense of abandonment hang over the space. A secretary’s revelation that the case file no longer exists in the digital system—due to outdated protocols and “reforms”—shatters the narrator, exposing how state archives actively discard marginalized histories.
Mythology and the Anthills of Time
Azcapotzalco’s Nahuatl name, “place of anthills,” anchors the narrative in myth. The ants—symbols of persistence and guides to Mictlan, the underworld—become a visceral metaphor for the narrator’s grief. As they crawl through her body, they embody the relentless, almost predatory nature of memory. Historical layers collapse: the Tepanec empire’s former glory contrasts with the dystopian present, where the prosecutor’s office stands as a monument to institutional rot. The ants’ 130-million-year lineage underscores the tension between ephemeral human records and ancient, unyielding cycles of life and death.
Cold Cases and Cigarette Breaks
At Agency 40, the bureaucratic farce deepens. A clerk’s resigned explanation—“records don’t live forever”—echoes like a death sentence. The Cold Case Unit offers no solace, only the grim reality that Liliana’s file may have been shredded or lost. Outside, Sorais smokes with a defiance that contrasts with the narrator’s spiraling despair. A stranger’s warning about earwigs—a mundane yet eerie detail—heightens the surreal atmosphere. The women’s wait becomes a metaphor for the Sisyphean fight against a state that erases femicides as swiftly as it enables them.
Language as a Weapon
The section pivots to Mexico’s belated recognition of femicide in 2012, exposing how linguistic voids perpetuate violence. Before legal terms existed, victims were blamed, their deaths dismissed as “crimes of passion.” The narrator channels the fury of Las Tesis’ anthem “A Rapist in Your Path”—“It wasn’t her fault / or where she was / or how she dressed”—to confront the systemic gaslighting. A phone call with a dismissive attorney crystallizes her resolve: “I seek justice.” The act of speaking these words aloud, after decades of silence, becomes revolutionary.
Traffic Jams and Umbilical Cords
The day ends in a gridlock of taillights and rain, the city’s chaos mirroring the narrator’s inner turmoil. A weary Uber driver’s breakdown—softened by Sorais’ candy—highlights the collective exhaustion of navigating a broken world. Yet, in this stasis, clarity emerges: if the state’s archives fail, the narrator must build her own. Writing becomes an act of resistance, a way to resurrect Liliana’s story and defy institutional erasure. The drive home transforms into a vow: to weaponize memory, reconstructing what bureaucracy has destroyed.
Key Takeaways
- Bureaucracy as erasure: Institutional systems actively discard marginalized histories, forcing survivors to confront gaps and silences.
- Mythology as survival: Ancient symbols (ants, Mictlan) frame grief as both a personal and collective journey through time.
- Language and justice: Legal recognition of femicide disrupts victim-blaming narratives, but systemic change remains glacial.
- Archival defiance: When state records vanish, personal and collective memory become tools of resistance.
- Solidarity in exhaustion: Shared moments of despair—a cigarette, a candy, a traffic jam—reveal the resilience of those fighting for justice.
Confronting the Unseen
The narrative shifts to a tense restaurant encounter where the protagonist and Sorais unexpectedly cross paths with a professor accused of sexual harassment. The man, accompanied by a young woman, hastily retreats upon recognition, highlighting the unpunished normalization of gender violence. Sorais’ disbelief and dark laughter underscore the systemic impunity shielding perpetrators, even as their victims and allies grapple with the weight of unaddressed harm. The pair’s silent toast—“We are going to topple it”—echoes the resolve of countless women fighting patriarchal structures.
A Ritual of Grief and Memory
On October 4, Liliana’s fifty-first birthday, the narrator visits her grave with their parents. The scene is steeped in visceral sorrow: the small tombstone, the ritual of weeding and watering, and the unspoken guilt that binds the family. The father’s physical labor—removing weeds with a hoe—becomes a metaphor for his lifelong struggle against futility and regret, haunted by institutional corruption (e.g., bribes demanded by investigators) and societal victim-blaming. The mother’s sighs and fragmented words (“Destiny. Happiness.”) hint at a grief too vast for language.
Echoes of Resistance and Collective Struggle
The visit to the cemetery intertwines personal mourning with broader societal critique. Liliana’s death—and the decades of silence that followed—mirrors Mexico’s epidemic of femicides, exacerbated by state negligence and the “War on Drugs.” The narrator reflects on the cultural shift: from isolation and shame to collective action, where voices now demand justice openly. The family’s persistence in tending Liliana’s grave, despite time’s stagnation, mirrors the resilience of movements fighting gender violence.
Key Takeaways
- Impunity Persists: Perpetrators of gender violence often evade consequences, their lives uninterrupted, while victims and their families endure lifelong trauma.
- Grief as Resistance: Personal acts of remembrance, like tending a grave, become acts of defiance against societal erasure and institutional failure.
- Collective Power: The shift from silence to solidarity underscores the necessity of communal action to dismantle systemic oppression and honor lost lives.
Liliana's Invincible Summer
Part II: This Sky, Annoyingly Blue
Overview
Liliana’s life unfolds through fragments—ink-stained letters, cardboard boxes heavy with memory, and the quiet violence of words unspoken. Her journey from adolescence to tragedy is etched in the artifacts she leaves behind: napkins scribbled with secrets, diaries veiling turmoil, and drafts of letters that blur confession with art. These remnants, tucked away for decades, become a rebellion against forgetting, a fight to preserve her voice in a world eager to silence it.
The cardboard boxes guarding her possessions mirror her family’s unresolved grief, their contents a haunting ledger of loss no one dares to confront. Yet within them lies evidence of a darker thread—the language of violence embedded in love twisted into control. References to jealousy and isolation in her letters echo societal failures: romanticized toxicity in Mexican culture, medical neglect, and the grim foresight of tools like the Danger Assessment that might have named her danger too late.
Her handwriting—a bold, architectural script—charts her growing autonomy, each stroke a defiance of expectation. Even her choice of paper and ink becomes a manifesto, a way to provoke and connect. This tactile self-expression contrasts with her family’s rootless existence, tied to her father’s work with potatoes, symbols of buried histories and displacement. Their migration to Toluca, marked by dates that eerily foreshadow her death, weaves personal rupture into broader legacies of survival.
The sisters’ bond thrives in clandestine mimicry of scientists, their shared world of potato tastings and volcanic expeditions a refuge from Toluca’s rigid hierarchies. Moments like a surreal barbecue on the volcano’s slopes—where words dissolve into wind—offer fleeting belonging. Yet Liliana’s letters reveal a restless heart navigating crushes, existential angst, and whispered warnings about “men’s love.” Her relationship with Angel begins as a dance of pursuit and resistance, his persistence clashing with her guardedness, until her diaries betray a shift from affection to simmering disdain.
Cristina, her sister, embodies contradictions—mocking Liliana’s pop-fueled whimsy while envying her capacity for unconditional love. Their clashes underscore a deeper tension between cynicism and vulnerability, intellect and emotion. Liliana’s later writings spiral into existential fatigue, questioning justice, love’s emptiness, and the haunting unknown of her future. She assigns colors to friends, defends lies as armor, and wonders aloud what might have been saved if others had glimpsed her fate.
Through it all, the chapter pulses with urgency—the way memory clings like smoke, how silence can scream louder than words, and why a girl’s archived life, boxed and buried, demands to be reckoned with.
The Weight of Words and Memory
Liliana’s first kiss on November 31, 1982, marks a pivotal shift from childhood to adolescence—a moment where secrecy and self-expression collide. Writing becomes her refuge, a way to navigate newfound intimacy and control over her inner world. She archives every fragment of her life: scribbled napkins, folded notes, drafts of letters, even bus tickets. These objects, stored in cardboard boxes, transform into a tangible record of her evolving identity. The act of writing isn’t just communication; it’s a rebellion against oblivion.
Cardboard Boxes: Silent Witnesses
Liliana’s possessions—books, notebooks, clothes—are meticulously preserved in boxes that haunt her family like unspoken grief. Moved from her apartment to her parents’ home, then to a new house, the boxes remain untouched for thirty years. They embody the unresolved trauma of her death, a physical manifestation of loss that her family avoids confronting. The narrator grapples with reopening them, fearing the emotional tsunami they might unleash. The boxes symbolize both the impossibility of moving on and the necessity of confronting the past.
The Language of Violence
The section shifts to dissecting intimate partner violence, citing Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises. Love, twisted into control and possession, fuels domestic homicide. Jacquelyn Campbell’s Danger Assessment tool is highlighted—a framework that could have helped Liliana recognize escalating threats: jealousy, stalking, isolation. Her letters hint at these red flags, but without the language to name them, she remains trapped. The text critiques societal complicity, from romanticized violence in Mexican culture to medical professionals’ historical indifference, underscoring how language shapes survival.
Handwriting as Identity
Liliana’s handwriting evolves from polished cursive to a bold, architectural style, reflecting her growing autonomy. Her letters are tactile experiences—crafted with colored inks, strategic doodles, and origami-like folds. Each detail, from paper texture to ink color, reveals her desire to connect and provoke. Even her drafts are preserved, blurring the line between private confession and artistic expression. Her final note, written hours before her death, becomes a haunting testament to her unwavering voice.
Roots and Rupture
The family’s migration to Toluca, tied to their father’s work as a potato geneticist, anchors their history in agriculture. A provocative claim about potatoes’ origins sparks debates, mirroring the family’s own uprootedness. The date of his employment—July 16, 1974—foreshadows Liliana’s death exactly sixteen years later, weaving personal tragedy into broader narratives of displacement and legacy. The potato, a humble tuber, becomes a metaphor for buried histories and the fragility of life.
Continuity Note: The next section will explore how Liliana’s archive is finally unpacked, revealing layers of her story alongside the systemic failures that silenced her.
Secret Mimicry and Shared Worlds
The sisters’ bond deepens through clandestine imitation of the scientists their father works with—exaggerated gestures, mock accents, and pencil “cigarettes” become their private language. Their lives revolve around their father’s potato research: tastings in the kitchen, expeditions to collect wild potato specimens on the volcano, and a near-religious devotion to the crop. The family’s immersion in this world blurs the line between work and play, science and survival.
Firelight and Fugitive Words
A barbecue hosted by Jerónimo, an ex-guerrilla turned laborer, becomes a surreal moment of connection. The ritual of roasting a goat on the volcano’s slopes binds two families in a fleeting, almost sacred camaraderie. Conversations between the adults dissolve into the landscape—words “swim” in the lagoon, cling to trees, and vanish with the wind. For the sisters, the memory of the meal lingers as a rare, unspoken acknowledgment of belonging.
A Family of Exiles
The mother’s stern lesson after a slammed door cements the family’s identity as outsiders shaped by ancestral resilience. They are taught to see themselves as survivors of epidemics, poverty, and displacement, forging a “volatile sovereign republic” of four. Toluca, with its rigid social hierarchies and conservative values, sharpens their sense of transience. Liliana, however, begins to root herself in the city’s rhythms, while the narrator resists attachment.
Letters as Lifelines
Liliana’s teenage years unfold through a torrent of letters—decorated with glitter, stickers, and dried flowers—exchanged with friends and cousins. These missives are lifelines for navigating first loves, insecurities, and societal expectations. The correspondence reveals a world where apologies are elaborate rituals, crushes are dissected with humor, and existential angst (“Why does it have to be this way?”) coexists with declarations of eternal friendship. Yet darker undercurrents emerge, like Yazmin’s haunting reflection on inherited violence or an anonymous warning against “men’s love.”
Angel and the Art of Pursuit
At 14, Liliana meets Angel González Ramos at a gym, where his persistent courtship begins. Initially dismissive, she slowly warms to him, confiding in friends like Carla. Their relationship evolves through shared smoothies, gym encounters, and typed letters where Liliana oscillates between playful sarcasm (“I’m tired of talking about little fools”) and vulnerability (“I love you more for it”). Angel’s determination contrasts with her guardedness, hinting at a dynamic that will define their future.
High School on the Fringes
Liliana’s transition to High School No. 5—a stark campus on Toluca’s outskirts—mirrors the city’s uneasy clash of rural and urban worlds. Here, she navigates a social landscape of “peasants and businessmen’s sons,” excelling academically while cautiously embracing romance. A typed letter to her cousin Leticia reveals her pride in grades, mock exasperation at suitors, and a growing attachment to Angel, whom she lists among her “best friends.”
Key Takeaways
- The sisters’ bond is forged through shared rebellion and immersion in their father’s scientific world.
- Family identity revolves around resilience and outsiderhood, resisting assimilation into Toluca’s rigid culture.
- Liliana’s letters act as both a creative outlet and a survival tool for navigating adolescence, love, and existential fears.
- Her relationship with Angel begins as a cautious dance of pursuit and resistance, set against a backdrop of societal transition.
- The chapter juxtaposes fleeting moments of belonging (the barbecue) with the sisters’ enduring sense of displacement.
Liliana’s Shifting Affections
By August 1985, Liliana’s diary entries reveal a stark transformation in her feelings toward Angel. Once a source of laughter and calm, he now incites irritation and disdain. Her frustration is palpable: “I’m (ALREADY) fed up with him… no remorse about it.” Meanwhile, her attention pivots to other romantic interests—José Luis, Gerardo, and Fontana—hinting at a restless exploration of affection. The diary becomes a space to catalog fleeting crushes and the thrill of being desired, even as she grapples with the instability of her emotions.
The Weight of Unspoken Words
Liliana’s writings oscillate between confession and evasion. She acknowledges a “voluminous and transparent” shift in her relationship with Angel but refuses to name its cause. The diary entries act as both “window and curtain,” revealing emotional turbulence while obscuring its roots. Her refusal to articulate the rupture—“Unnamed, perhaps unnameable”—suggests a struggle to reconcile her feelings with societal narratives of romance. This ambiguity mirrors her broader reflections on love as something that “bugs her, that annoys her… she does not recognize as her own.”
Sisterhood and Contradictions
Cristina, Liliana’s older sister, provides a sharp counterpoint to her worldview. Their relationship is marked by friction: Cristina mocks Liliana’s pop-music tastes and “consumerist” tendencies, while Liliana dismisses Cristina’s intellectual rigidity. A pivotal car conversation crystallizes their divide. After Cristina vents hatred toward their mother, Liliana retorts, “What happens, Cristina, is that you don’t know how to love.” The accusation stuns Cristina, who privately acknowledges Liliana’s capacity for unconditional love—a quality she herself distrusts.
Colorful Fantasies and Silent Truths
In a whimsical yet revealing passage, Liliana assigns colors to friends and crushes—Adrian as brown, Gabriela as yellow, Oscar as a rainbow—transforming relationships into vivid abstractions. This act of imaginative categorization contrasts with her insistence on secrecy: “What if everything… was spelled out in the open? No mystery? How boring, right?” She defends lying as a tool to protect inner truths, framing silence as a necessary boundary.
Existential Fatigue and Unanswered Questions
The diary closes with Liliana’s exhaustion. Overwhelmed by chlorine-induced itching, school stress, and existential doubts, she muses: “What if there was justice? What if people appreciated others for who they are?” Her fatigue extends to love itself—“I am tired of finding it all… they don’t satisfy me”—culminating in a haunting question: “What if you knew what would become of me?” The entry dissolves into fragmented imagery of flowers and aging, leaving her future unresolved.
Key Takeaways
- Emotional Volatility: Liliana’s diaries trace a rapid shift from affection to contempt, underscoring the instability of young love and the tension between desire and autonomy.
- Silence as Power: Her refusal to name specific conflicts highlights the duality of language—both revealing and concealing—as a means of self-protection.
- Sibling Dynamics: Cristina’s narrative adds depth to Liliana’s character, contrasting intellectual cynicism with emotional vulnerability.
- Existential Restlessness: Liliana’s musings on justice, identity, and mortality reflect a broader search for meaning beyond romantic entanglements.
- Unresolved Legacy: The closing question—“What if you knew what would become of me?”—lingers, inviting reflection on the gaps between lived experience and historical memory.
Liliana's Invincible Summer
Part III: We Go Like She-Devils, We Go Like Bitches
Overview
In the swirling chaos of late-1980s Mexico City, Liliana’s academic turmoil collides with her fight for survival, her typewriter and anarchist pamphlets never far from reach. Broke but fiercely independent, she crashes on couches and lectures on feminism, her thesis on urban movements mirroring her own navigation of protests and crumbling apartments. Yet freedom tastes bittersweet. Her whirlwind romance with Angel—all gym muscles and hollow promises—cracks open under his controlling lies, leaving her to dissect his betrayal in raw, ink-stained letters that blend personal heartbreak with searing critiques of patriarchal hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, her father Antonio writes from snowy Uppsala, his academic exile laced with guilt. He champions his daughters’ independence even as his own absence gnaws at him, his letters oscillating between pride and quiet despair. Their fractured connection echoes through the narrator’s manuscript, a patchwork of gritty stories born from Mexico’s economic collapse. Rejections and literary contests become battlegrounds, the act of writing both a lifeline and a rebellion against a society Octavio Paz might’ve romanticized.
The city itself pulses like a fever dream—train-hopping anarchists, ghost-haunted markets, architecture programs offering escape. Xian and Terri, the manuscript’s protagonists, wander this same urban labyrinth, their aimless rebellion echoing Liliana’s restless energy. Kidnappings turn surreal, baths become acts of defiance, and a spectral black dog trails them, embodying the snarling resilience of those who “go like she-devils” through a world that demands ferocity.
Yet Liliana lingers, a ghost in the margins. Her absence at the book launch in Coyoacán whispers of unanswered questions: Did her sister ever truly see her? Can art stitch together what distance and death unravel? The answer hums in the tension between sacrifice and survival, between Antonio’s academic rigor and the narrator’s desperate scribbles, between love letters that wound and stories that outlast their authors. Here, in the chaos, freedom isn’t a manifesto—it’s the stubborn act of claiming space, one fractured sentence at a time.
Liliana’s Academic Turmoil and Urban Survival
Liliana navigates a precarious existence in Mexico City, balancing her thesis on women’s roles in urban movements with teaching sociology classes at UAEM. Financially strained, she couch-surfs and inhabits rundown apartments, relishing her newfound freedom from her parents. Her days are marked by political activism, anarchist circles, and debates about feminism, corruption, and global crises like Chernobyl. This independence fuels her intellectual fervor but leaves her rootless, mirroring the chaotic energy of 1987’s student strikes.
The Rise and Fall of Liliana and Angel’s Relationship
Angel, a brash, gym-built auto parts heir, aggressively pursues Liliana, showering her with flowers, chocolates, and attention. Their relationship becomes a high school spectacle—Liliana’s elegance juxtaposed against Angel’s “trouble” persona. Early red flags emerge: his controlling “vehemence,” secretive behavior, and unresolved ties to ex-girlfriend Araceli. By July 1987, Liliana confronts him in a raw, heartbroken letter after discovering his betrayal through his sister. She oscillates between defiance and despair, questioning her naivety but vowing to rebuild herself. Angel’s manipulative apologies and half-truths only deepen her disillusionment.
Letters as Windows to Inner Chaos
Liliana’s correspondence reveals her grappling with identity and agency. She critiques Angel’s dishonesty, asserting her right to transparency and self-respect. Her writing shifts from playful musings on freedom to frantic self-interrogation: “Why did I have to find out from Verénica?” The Valentine’s card—a symbol of Angel’s performative love—becomes a metaphor for his hollow “I,” prioritizing possession over partnership. Liliana’s vulnerability contrasts with her sharp critiques of societal sexism, reflecting her struggle to reconcile personal pain with broader feminist ideals.
Mexico City as a Character
The sprawling, anarchic city mirrors Liliana’s internal chaos. She navigates protests, train-hopping adventures, and gritty neighborhoods like Buenos Aires, where ghost stories and black-market deals seep into daily life. Her transient existence—typewriter in tow—echoes her manifesto: “We are not in love.” Yet the city also offers reinvention: Liliana’s acceptance into UAM’s architecture program marks a pivotal escape from Toluca’s suffocating norms, symbolizing her tentative steps toward autonomy.
Clashing Visions of Freedom
While Liliana romanticizes freedom as intellectual and bodily autonomy (“the sacred right to do as we pleased”), Angel weaponizes it as control. His “neuronal congestion” excuses and gaslighting tactics contrast with Liliana’s earnest quest for honesty. Even as she dances at anarchist parties or writes feverishly, her letters betray a haunting question: Can a woman truly claim freedom in a world that equates love with possession? The answer, for now, lies in her defiant PS: “I KNOW I DON’T DESERVE THINGS LIKE THIS!!!”
Antonio's Academic Pressures and Family Longing
Antonio’s letters from Uppsala reveal a man torn between academic ambition and familial guilt. His PhD pursuits in Sweden strain his emotional connection to Liliana and Cristina, whom he repeatedly urges to embrace independence while mourning their physical absence. He oscillates between pride in their academic achievements (“I tell my colleagues here… they can’t help but laugh”) and raw vulnerability (“It hurts me to be away from you”). His attempts to rationalize the separation—framing it as necessary for their futures—clash with admissions of regret over missed moments and the “high price” of his absence.
The Manuscript's Journey
Amid Mexico’s economic and political turmoil, the narrator channels despair into writing, submitting “The War Doesn’t Matter” to a literary contest despite rejection from workshops (notably for contradicting Octavio Paz’s ideals). The fragmented stories within the manuscript mirror Mexico City’s chaotic energy, blending gritty realism with existential dread. Winning the San Luis Potosí award becomes a lifeline, funding the narrator’s escape to the U.S.—a stark contrast to Antonio’s academic exile in Sweden.
Xian and Terri's Urban Odyssey
The manuscript’s protagonists, Xian and Terri, embody restless disillusionment. Their aimless wanderings through decaying neighborhoods and volatile relationships reflect a generation adrift. A surreal kidnapping subplot—where Xian is held captive yet indulges in nostalgic baths—highlights their paradoxical search for agency within powerlessness. The recurring motif of a “black dog” (described as “the devil” and a mirror of their own ferocity) underscores their fraught resilience: “We go like bitches, we go like little she-devils, with our loneliness in tow.”
Liliana's Ghost in the Narrative
Though absent from the book launch in Coyoacán, Liliana haunts the text as both muse and mystery. The narrator questions whether their shared experiences in Mexico City—loneliness, fractured sisterhood—ever translated into meaningful dialogue. Her spectral presence in the stories blurs autobiography and fiction, suggesting art as a vessel for unresolved grief and connection.
Key Takeaways
- Sacrifice and Distance: Antonio’s academic ambitions strain familial bonds, echoing the narrator’s own exile through writing.
- Art as Survival: The narrator’s literary defiance mirrors Xian’s chaotic resilience, both navigating a Mexico City steeped in crisis.
- Urban Metaphors: Decaying neighborhoods and the “black dog” symbolize entrapment and fractured identity.
- Liliana’s Legacy: Her absence/presence underscores how art immortalizes relationships left unresolved in life.
Liliana's Invincible Summer
Part IV: Winter
Overview
The cold months bring both stillness and reckoning as a family’s quiet grief crystallizes into resolve. During a Houston Christmas marked by walks along the Harrisburg Trail and shared stories of Liliana, a fragile peace gives way to action: the decision to reopen her decades-old case. Rituals—like setting a photo of Liliana beside tacos al pastor on New Year’s Eve or swallowing twelve grapes at midnight—become anchors, transforming private sorrow into collective action. Even a stranger’s mysterious gift of $25 on the trail feels like a nod from the beyond, urging them forward.
In Mexico City, the pursuit of justice unfolds through bureaucratic labyrinths and haunted spaces. Legal meetings expose systemic rot—outdated charges, vanished evidence—while visits to Liliana’s old apartment, Mimosas 658, and her university campus, UAM Azcapotzalco, blur past and present. Crumbling lavender-painted crates and sunlit architecture studios pulse with her absence, while murals linking her story to Mexico’s history of state violence underscore how personal loss intertwines with political erasure.
The grind of paperwork—handwritten requests, dusty archives—reveals both neglect and unexpected allies. Rocio Padilla, a reserved bureaucrat turned collaborator, embodies this tension, shifting from institutional inertia to solidarity. Together, they envision a memorial at the university, not just for Liliana but for all victims of gender violence, transforming classrooms and gardens into living witnesses. Here, grief becomes geography, etching memory into brick and soil, demanding accountability.
Through it all, persistence threads the narrative: in a father’s clenched jaw, a mother’s tear-streaked plea, a sister’s dogged steps through legal quagmires. Even as institutions falter, the act of remembering—rituals, murals, a single envelope of cash—fuels a quiet revolution, turning solitary anguish into a chorus calling for change.
Family Rituals and the Weight of Memory
The narrator’s family gathers in Houston for Christmas 2019, their routines steeped in quiet grief. Daily walks along the Harrisburg Trail with aging parents become a backdrop for shared memories of Liliana. During one walk, the narrator reveals their intent to reopen Liliana’s case, met with emotional resolve from their father and a tearful plea for justice from their mother. This moment—punctuated by a sudden whirlwind of leaves and the scent of grapefruit—signals a shift: the family’s private sorrow transforms into collective action.
On New Year’s Eve, a simple meal of tacos al pastor is elevated by rituals: a photo of Liliana framed in cherry wood sits at the table, her presence palpable. For the first time in decades, the family speaks openly about her—recalling her childhood, her laughter, and her illness—without collapsing into despair. At midnight, they swallow twelve grapes, each silently wishing for resolution. The next day, a mysterious cyclist on the Harrisburg Trail hands the narrator an envelope containing $25, a gesture they interpret as Liliana’s cryptic blessing.
Bureaucratic Labyrinths and Haunted Spaces
In Mexico City, the narrator and their husband, Saul, meet lawyer Héctor Pérez Rivera to navigate the legal maze of Liliana’s 30-year-old case. Héctor outlines challenges: outdated charges (“homicide” instead of “femicide”), lost files, and institutional inertia. Despite setbacks, optimism lingers. The couple then visits Mimosas 658, Liliana’s former apartment, now a construction office. The current owner permits them to explore, and the narrator describes the space in vivid detail—Liliana’s makeshift bedroom, her lavender-painted crates, the kitchen she rarely used. A neighbor recalls her kindness and the boyfriend’s black car, but fear of retaliation silences deeper revelations.
UAM Azcapotzalco: Traces of a Life Interrupted
The visit to Liliana’s university campus, UAM Azcapotzalco, becomes a pilgrimage. Founded in the wake of the 1968 student massacre, the school’s open architecture and progressive ethos contrast sharply with the control her murderer sought. The narrator imagines Liliana here—smoking, laughing, debating—and notes a mural honoring Ayotzinapa’s disappeared students, linking past and present state violence. In the architecture department, they sense her presence: in sunlight on drawing boards, in echoes of footsteps. A clerk confirms Liliana’s academic success, though privacy laws withhold her records.
Key Takeaways
- Grief as Connection: The dead remain present through rituals, shared stories, and physical spaces, transforming solitude into collective memory.
- Justice as Persistence: Legal and emotional battles intertwine; reopening old wounds is necessary for healing.
- Haunted Geography: Locations like Mimosas 658 and UAM Azcapotzalco act as archives of personal and political history.
- Institutional Echoes: Universities and legal systems reflect societal struggles—both sites of liberation and systemic failure.
Navigating Bureaucracy and Building Alliances
The narrator recounts the painstaking process of securing official records for their sister, emphasizing the manual labor involved—handwriting requests, making copies, and navigating university offices without digital tools. This bureaucratic effort underscores both the systemic inefficiencies and the narrator’s relentless dedication to preserving their sister’s memory.
Rocio Padilla: A Strategic Partner
Rocio Padilla, head of the Office of Gender Equality, emerges as a pivotal figure. Despite her reserved demeanor, her quick decision to collaborate signals a shift from bureaucratic inertia to actionable support. The narrator’s proposal—to create a memorial space at UAM Azcapotzalco honoring their sister and other victims of gender violence—is met not with hesitation but with immediate solidarity. Padilla’s response, “Let’s think together about how to do it,” reframes the request as a shared mission, blending personal grief with institutional accountability.
A Vision for Collective Memory
The proposed memorial transcends individual tragedy, aiming to commemorate all women affected by gender violence—survivors and victims alike. By anchoring the project within the university’s physical spaces (classrooms, corridors, gardens), the narrator seeks to transform passive environments into active witnesses of history. This vision challenges the institution to confront its role in perpetuating or combating systemic violence, turning abstract grief into tangible change.
Key Takeaways
- Bureaucracy as a Barrier (and Catalyst): Manual record-keeping symbolizes institutional neglect, yet persistence within these systems can yield unexpected allies.
- Collaboration Over Confrontation: Padilla’s partnership highlights the power of aligning personal advocacy with institutional resources.
- Memorials as Activism: Honoring victims in everyday spaces forces institutions and communities to acknowledge complicity and commit to change.
