“Almost everyone lost someone during the war,” Christina Rivera Garza writes The Restless Dead: Necarroting and Disposration.
In 2006, Mexican President Felip Calderone launched the country’s war on drugs, which he described as a military crack on cruel drugs, maintained a treaty of stability with previous regime. ” Its toll is estimated to disappear 360,000 housewives and more than 60,000. Riviera Garza refers to it not as a drug war but as a Callarynista Warte Classeron War.
Violence has not only changed life in Mexico, Riviera Garza has argued in restless dead, but also how the author writes and understands himself as creators. In recent years, the country has seen the emergence of a writing style that leads the ways that a community has collectively produced a lesson-collectively a literary transition, sees how it is opposing violence through Mexican Society community-based activism. Together, in terms of intensive loss, these new literary equipment and activist approaches are creating new vocabular and practices that hurt the families of the victims and claim justice to their loved ones.
Today, most of the murders in Mexico are caused by dislikes, with an increase in violent crime, including Femaids, and it has left the families of the victims to investigate their cases. Christina Riviera Garza’s family is one of these search families, although she suffered losses before the war began. Riviera Garza’s most recent book, Liliana’s invincible Samarvich was released in Mexico in 2021 and was kept in English by Riviera Garza from HGRA Press in 2023, which is his personal contribution to the body of the unresolved murder of Mexico.
Liliana’s unbeatable summer is the story of the writer’s sister, Liliana Rivera Garza, a 20 -year -old college student, when she was murdered by her ex -boyfriend, Lengel Gonzalez Ramos on 16 July 1990. In a way, this is a detective story. But this is one in which the discovery process is incomplete and is possible only through collective story.
At the opening of the text, Riviera Garza tries and fails to detect his sister’s case file. Like many other cases in Mexico, it turns out that there is no official record of killing her sister. He has to find other ways to connect the story together.
She begins with several letters from Liliana and the note she wrote during her brief life on notebooks, diaries and loose papers. But even with that source material, Riviera Garza soon realizes that she may not understand about Liliana papers alone. He needs the help of people close to his sister – especially those who were close to him in the months before his assassination.
The lesson turns into a collective effort – a community collection that documentation of Liliana’s life. With Liliana’s letters and diary entries, Riviera brings news clips from tabloids about the assassination of Garza Liliana, testimony from Liliana’s friends and family and her sister’s own reflections and memories. Community effort is also present in the graphic design of the book: The front cover beer beer-e-photograph of Liliana of the book was taken by her friend Othon Santos Olverage, while Liliana college friend Raul Aspino Madrigal designed the fan used for Liliana notes, which designed her real handing. Was designed on the basis.
Liliana Riviera Garja was killed before the murder and became an epidemic in Feminicid Mexico. At that time, there were some outlets to replace Riviera Garza. For nearly 30 years, he and his parents hurt Liliana alone and in silence, lack of words to name Liliana or justice. “Facing with unimaginable, we did not know what to do. So we became silent … for corruption for lack of justice, resigned for impurities.”
In the decades after Liliana’s assassination, Feminicides multiplied. Riviera Garza writes, “The dead women multiplied among us. “Mexico received so many rains in the form of a wrong war, so -called wars on drugs, destroyed the entire villages and cities, clearing the way for more death.” As the deaths increased, the number of families who hurt the number of families increased.
Gradually, the mournings held together to mourn and look for justice. For example, in Siudad Juarez, Chihuahua, mothers of feminicids victims formed ground -level organizations, in which justice for our daughters (justice for our daughters) and our daughters worked (bringing homes home), such as to do the work by corrupt and indifferent officers, such as corrupt and indifferent officials.
Like Riviera Garza’s family, these families faced a challenge of lack of words to name their daughters. Therefore, as scholar Tricia Service argues, he created a novel vocabulary to condemn misunderstanding violence, express his pain and anger, claim justice for the victims and support their public protests.
One of the most basic words was the lack of a family, which was a word for the crime that happened. With scholars like María Marcela Lagarde Y de Los Ríos, collectives organized for Mexico to adopt Feminicids (Feminicides) as a crime classification. According to Lagard and D Los Rios, Famicides (deficed, lack of middle syllable) means completely “killing women.” The families of the murder of Mexican women required a word for the systemic nature of killings- “the dress of women’s human rights violations, including crimes against crimes and the disappearance of women.” In 2012, Feminicidio was added to the general law on the reach of women for violence -free life (common work for life -free life free from women’s violence), which was defined as “extreme gender violence”.
Family activists also brought a word for their work in the public sector: members of the victim of the victim of a crime who actively participate in the investigation of the crime. The naming of his major role enabled him to pursue his discoveries for justice: In 2008, Article 20 of the Mexican Constitution amended to give Kodavuvantas the right to participate in the official inquiry.
Riviera Garza and his family saw the mourning of other families of the victims of Feminoids in silence, until one day the activism of others gave them the strength to break the silence and seek justice for Liliana. She writes: “The day finally came and with others, thanks to the strength of others, we were able to conceive, even fathom, that we are also worth justice … that we can fight, loudly and with others, to bring you here, to bring you here, in the language of justice.” The collective activism of other families provided her vocabulary to claim justice for her sister, and taught her that grief is not a person and shameful issue, but a collective process of treatment.
Since Riviera Garza published her sister’s story, Liliana Rivera has become a symbol of collective activity against Garza Feminicide. The English version of the book contains photographs documenting the presence of the book in activism in Mexico and Latin America. A woman, who was wearing white clothes, picks up a placard, stating, “Liliana Riviera Garza, 1990, killed justice.” Another in another Mexico City shows a group of women in a protest, with Liliana’s name on the metal safety shutter of a jewelry shop. The readers have also organized collective readings of the book that honored Liliana’s memory.
While writing about the book of Riviera Garza in the US, I cannot escape thinking that Liliana’s invincible heat provides a powerful message about the mass event that crosses boundaries and applies to various national references. Here, homeicide and feminicide are often not designated as social crises. Nevertheless, the frequency of large -scale firing and hatred crimes is affected by the ways that violence is also integral to American society. Liliana’s invincible heat provides an example of how to collectively nominate our society as extreme violence and use justice at the ground level to claim justice for victims of massacres, guns, racial and gender violence in the United States.
Natalia Villanuwa-Naves is a professor of Latinian literature and culture at Sonoma State University. It was written for Public Square Plint.