I talked at length about migration and borders with visual artist Ekaterina Murumseva. She transformed our words into this watercolor (318 x 200 cms).
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U-TÓPICOS CONTEMPORÁNEOS
I talked at length about migration and borders with visual artist Ekaterina Murumseva. She transformed our words into this watercolor (318 x 200 cms).
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Cristina Rivera Garza
“Dream Man,” translated from the Spanish by Francisca González-Arias, Freeman’s
Announcing the Winners of the 2023O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction here
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A short story translated by Sarah Booker at The Yale Review.
The person who was driving these narrow country roads, now skillfully avoiding the body of some nocturnal animal, was as bitter as the saliva he couldn’t swallow. I screamed it to the heavens: I am not a happy man. I shouted it out to the deer that forced me to screech to a stop in the middle of the road, the deer that kept looking at me with its big, bright eyes as I got out of my car and fell to my knees on the asphalt, crying. Who are you? I yelled. What the hell are you doing out here? I realized it was just a fawn, cocking its head to the left. I said it once I could finally stand and get back in the car, looking into the rearview mirror: I am not a happy man. I am barely a man.
Translated by Sarah Booker.
Full text: The Yale Review.
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INSITE is pleased to announce the fifth issue of the INSITE Journal: Speech Acts. The publication, edited by Andrea Torreblanca, explores speech, language, and the performative as forms of political action. It includes the script and documentation of Speech Acts, a short play that was developed from fragments of writings and recorded dialog culled from the INSITE Archive, and presented in Mexico City (2021); a conversation between Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds and Andrea Torreblanca; a recent interview with the artist Andrea Fraser; a text republished and translated for the first time into Spanish by author, curator, and filmmaker AriellaAïsha Azoulay; and commissioned essays by theoretician and architect Keller Easterling and writer Cristina Rivera Garza.
In “Art and Enactment” (2022), Andrea Fraser explains her interest in using the term enactment as a process that occurs and evolves from the psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the compulsory. In the essay “Another Part of Speech” (2022), Keller Easterling outlines forms of sovereignty as solidarities that are not reduced to specific places but are rather atomized and mobile. In “Unlearning Our Colonial Languages, On Language and Belonging” (2021), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces in retrospect the complexity of her genealogy and identity that she describes as “impacted by two colonial projects: a descendant of the colonized in Algeria, and a daughter of colonizers in Palestine.” Cristina Rivera Garza writes the text “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Femicide?” (2022), which departs from the infamous case of the murder of her sister in the 1990s, to speak about how narratives, which only recently were defined as femicides, have focused on the perspective of the perpetrators, including the grammar used to prosecute them, and on literature, where the stories fictionalize—if not justify—the motives behind a crime.
INSITE Journal 05 Speech Acts here.
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Bajo el piso transparente de la alberca que se encuentra en el edificio donde se entregó este premio que reconoce a la literatura vasca e internacional.
Gracias, Bilbao!
Artículo completo aquí.
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María Teresa Priego registró el lenguaje de las pancartas de este 8 de marzo, incluidas las que invocaron a #LilianaRiveraGarza.
”La hermana asesinada de la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza está presente: “Liliana, tu verano es invencible”. Qué libro extraordinario el que Cristina escribió para ella/con ella: “El invencible verano de Liliana”.
Artículo entero aquí.
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By Hamilton Cane
March 2, 2023
Just before the world locked down, Rivera Garza canvassed the capital, accompanied by her husband and friend as they tried to locate files connected to Liliana’s murder. Despite three decades her agony was — is — still raw, as is that of her aged parents, and her quest for justice is re-created in her punctilious, fury-driven, incandescent memoir, “Liliana’s Invincible Summer.”
Despite her furnace of rage, Rivera Garza maintains perfect composure throughout “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” her first written in English without the help of a translator. (A Spanish edition, “El Invencible Verano de Liliana,” came out last year.) Each tightly drawn chapter showcases an array of gorgeous images or cadences; few authors deploy fragments as brilliantly, like grenades.
Full text by Hamilton Cane here
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A SISTER´S MURDER AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE
New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 2023
"This collaged portrait is one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read (and I have read many). Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance."
Katherine Dykstra
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[Translated by Max Granger]
In May 2021, only a few days after the publication of El invencible verano de Liliana – the book, available in English on February 28, in which I explore the femicide that claimed the life of Liliana Rivera Garza, my younger sister, on July 16, 1990 in Mexico City – I announced that I had created a Gmail account (elinvencibleveranodeliliana@gmail.com) with the intention of collecting any information on Ángel González Ramos, my sister’s ex-boyfriend at the time of her death, who still had (and still has) an arrest warrant out as her alleged murderer. I knew that Ángel González Ramos had evaded justice, but I had no idea how he had done it. In August of that same year, an email appeared in the inbox stating, plainly and succinctly, that Ángel González Ramos had been living in southern California under the name Mitchell Angelo Giovanni and had died on May 2, 2020 after drowning in Marina del Rey. Could this be true? Wasn’t it too much a coincidence that after 30 years, and just as the case had finally been brought to light, the alleged murderer would die under such strange circumstances? Was it possible he had faked his own death to evade justice?
The message came with a link to access his digital wake (it was 2020, and we were beginning to witness how the pandemic would affect our funeral rites) that included, in addition to condolences written from Mexico by people with the surname González Ramos, a series of photographs that documented the life of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni, from his birth on April 18, 1967 (the same birthdate as Ángel González Ramos) to the present. In the photographs was the boy with light eyes and blonde hair; the teenager in his leather jacket; the grown man with his thick neck and thinning hair, who, in different poses and among different company, never once stopped laughing. In all of the images of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni as an adult, he is smiling indiscriminately. Over and over again, as if it were a tic. He would peel back his lips and show his teeth, big and blindingly white. He would laugh at long-haired little girls, alongside young women, in the middle of family gatherings. He would smile next to Christmas trees and smile looking out at the ocean. Was he smiling at justice, knowing he had outwitted the law once again? Was he laughing at Liliana, telling her how after all these years he had come out on top – that he was still alive, while she lay, forever silenced, in a grave? Was he laughing at me, for failing to track him down? Was he laughing out of shame?
Was he laughing at you?
r
Se develará el mural que pintó Rocío Martínez con base en una fotografía que tomó Othón Santos Álvarez hace tantos años, y hablaremos de El invencible verano de Liliana en el mismo lugar donde #LilianaRiveraGarza estudió, conoció amigos, creció como arquitecta y persona, y fue feliz.
Gracias a la Rocío Guadalupe Padilla Saucedo por la organización de este evento desde la Unidad de Género y Diversidad Sexual de la UAM-A.
Habrá transmisión en vivo.
#JusticiaParaLiliana
#JusticiaParaTodas
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Un adelanto de Autobiografía del algodón en Confabulario, el suplemento cultural del periódico El Universal, Septiembre 13, 2020.
[un viento loco, sin freno; viento del norte]
Primero se escucha el ruido de los cascos sobre el suelo arenoso. Luego, agazapada y tensa, la respiración. Un resuello. Un resoplido. La tierra blancuzca se abre y emergen así los huizachales con sus copas redondas y sus raíces bien hundidas en la tierra, los mezquites con esas ramas espinosas de las que cuelgan vainas estrechas y largas y, ahora, a inicios casi ya de la primavera, estas flores amarillas. El galopar no cesa. Las herraduras del caballo eluden las biznagas que, esféricas, coronadas de espinas bruñidas, aparecen aquí y allá en el camino. Las flores blancas de la anacahuita. Los correcaminos. Las culebrillas. ¿No le habían asegurado que esto era un desierto? No hay tiempo para quedarse a mirar. De arriba cae la luz de un sol impune sobre la gobernadora, el coyotillo, la uña de gato. Y el viento, que levanta el polvo rosáceo, gris y canela de la llanura, choca contra las agrestes pencas del nopal que se elevan poco a poco, escalonadamente, hacia el cielo. La tierra se desmorona a su paso y todo a su alrededor tiene sed. Su boca, sobre todo. Su laringe. Su estómago. No sabe con exactitud cuántas horas lleva sobre el caballo—los muslos alrededor del torso colorado, los hombros echados hacia adelante, las manos acalambradas sobre la brida y los zapatos atorados en los estribos—pero quisiera estar a punto de llegar. Le han dicho que allá, a un día de camino si consigue cambiar los caballos, las cosas están que arden. Le han dicho que si quiere ver acción directa, si quiere cambiar el mundo de verdad, debe arrancarse más para el norte. Allá, a un paso de la frontera, encontrará Estación Camarón.
Allá acaba de estallar la huelga.
El artículo completo aquí.
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