Mexican Studies Research Collective

Join us on Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 4-5pm CT for a work-in-progress workshop with Diana Aldrete (Trinity College) on “Assembling Justice: Archival Interventions in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.”

Reading materials will be circulated with registered participants a week in advance.

This chapter-in-progress analyzes Cristina Rivera Garza’s El invencible verano de Liliana (2021) and its English version, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice (2023), as a hybrid literary work that blends memoir, archival practice, essay, and testimonial writing. It argues that Rivera Garza’s reconstruction of her sister’s life exemplifies how confronting feminicide requires a collective, layered documentation to seek justice. Drawing on River Garza’s own concepts of “necrowriting” and “disappropriation,” and through an analysis of the text’s formal construction as a “living archive” (a dynamic, affective space where memory resists erasure), this chapter shows how literature intervenes in state-sanctioned narratives of justice by reclaiming the victim’s subjectivity and positions memory as integral to justice work. Engaging Joseph Slaughter’s perspective on “world literature” as ethical terrain for the articulation of international human rights, the chapter also explores how public readings and international reception reposition Liliana’s story within a transnational demand for justice for all victims of feminicides. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that Rivera Garza’s work further reorients our ethical imperatives to one another and the responsibility of literature around feminicidal violence to reinforce and enact justice through memory.