El invencible verano de Liliana

Liliana Rivera Garza was killed by her ex-boyfriend on 16 July 1990. The killer fled and remains at large to this day. Liliana would have been yet another of the countless anonymous women murdered by men in Mexico if it were not for her sister, the writer Cristina Rivera Garza, who, thirty years after Liliana’s death, found the strength to delve into the archives and documents her sister left behind. After an arduous writing process, she restored her sister’s memory in 2021 with El invencible verano de Liliana, a memoir that the Autumn Festival now brings to the stage, featuring the prestigious Mexican actress Cecilia Suárez. Adapted as a monologue by playwright Amaranta Osorio and directed by Juan Carlos Fisher.

The play celebrates the life of the sister of the writer who received the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and Autobiography in 2024 for this work. El invencible verano de Liliana has also been awarded the José Donoso, Nuevo León, Alfonso Reyes, Xavier Villaurrutia, Rodolfo Walsh, and Mazatlán Literature Prizes since its publication. It stands as one of the greatest achievements of Cristina Rivera Garza, one of the most influential voices in contemporary Spanish-American literature, the author of ten novels and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel Nadie me verá llorar (1999) was praised by Carlos Fuentes as one of the finest works of Spanish-language literature of the late twentieth century.

In El invencible verano de Liliana, the intimate and public past of Liliana Rivera Garza is reconstructed through her own words, her thoughts and doubts captured in notes, phrases and diaries, compiled with care by her sister. We witness the reconstruction of the events leading up to the murder of a young university student, a story that mirrors a system marked by violence that has silenced thousands of women. With sensitivity and firmness, the staging of El invencible verano de Liliana invites us to remember, to be moved, and not to look away. This work, like the book that inspires it, is an act of love, a way of telling a woman’s story in her own voice, of honouring her life and her passage through this world. It is an exercise in mourning and a political act of reclaiming words, dignity, and justice.