Barcelona"When we read, we can put ourselves in other people's shoes and see the world through a perspective that is not our own: we either engage in dialogue or we confront each other," said writer Cristina Rivera Garza this Tuesday afternoon during the traditional Reading Proclamation, held at Barcelona City Hall and organized in collaboration with the collaboration of raising signs such as "we defend our libraries," "lack of staff," and "mistreated librarians," in protest of the working conditions of the staff. "Barcelona is transformed on April 23 into a large bookstore, an image that enamored a Nobel Prize winner for literature who recently passed away." Mario Vargas Llosa", said Xavier Marcé, current Councilor for Culture.
"I have been lucky enough to spend recent seasons in Barcelona thanks to a María Zambrano scholarship," explained Rivera Garza. "I have made some Catalan friends, but also some of the list of Latin American authors who live there. All of them have made me feel like one more part of the great cosmopolitan community that makes up the city. That is why I want to dedicate the speech to migrants."
The writer, born in Mexico in 1964 and resident in Texas for more than three decades —where she teaches creative writing at the University of Houston—, has focused on glossing the transformative power of a ". Reading provides the concrete detail and summons our senses. Let us imagine others, but from within ourselves." The writer has mentioned emblematic characters such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Andrea, which starred Nothing, by Carmen Laforet. "The power of imagination is that it can produce reality: we enter a book in one way and come out in another," she continued. "Since I read The waves"I have not looked at the sea equally. Reading is a first step in trying to change the world."
A Pulitzer Prize-winning town crier
"It was reading the documents of Liliana, my murdered sister, that I felt close again," he recalled. "It was an emotional encounter, but also with a purpose: to write a book." Although he debuted three decades ago with the novel Unknown (1994) and who has since published around twenty titles, was with Liliana's invincible summer (Random House Literature, 2021) that Cristina Rivera Garza achieved remarkable notoriety. It happened first in Spanish, but also in English: in 2024, the author's own translation of the book, which explains the unsolved femicide of her sister in 1990 while she was studying architecture in Mexico, received the Pulitzer Prize in the United States last year.
"Violence against women is capitalized, but even now the word femicide "It is rarely used: it needs to be mentioned more so that it enters the public conversation. We must preserve the collective memory of those who have left us, especially due to violence," he said today. Four years ago, when he presented Liliana's invincible summer, He said: "My sister had two great enemies: her murderer and the patriarchy."And also: "I'm fed up with novels that approach criminals by imbuing them with a kind of glamour"
"Reading those documents of my sister's brought me closer to her body again and, specifically, to her way of breathing," she continued today with Rivera. "It was so long, it almost made me choke. Could reading be a way of breathing air into the lungs of those who are no longer with us?" the Amazon," in this sense: "we come to breathe without pause, to reconnect." "Reading is breathing all together," she concluded, before expressing solidarity with the protest of the workers of the public library system.
During her subsequent conversation with journalist Anna Guitart, Cristina Rivera was "complicated." "Sometimes fiction has appropriated the experience of others without asking their permission, and that exasperates me," she said. "There are also those who say that with fiction you can do whatever you want. I do not quite agree with the author's clear opinion: "to do, we will resort to everything we know, but also, and above all, to what we do not know." That is why the hybridization of genres is found in a good part of Rivera Garza's books, as occurs in "the stories of speculative non-fiction" of Land (Random House Literature, 2025), from which the author wanted to read a fragment before closing the event in which her political and social commitment was once again made evident.
"I feel a terrible fear"
This morning, in a press conference, Rivera Garza expressed her concern about the current situation in the United States. "I feel terribly afraid. I have the impression that the way decisions are made from the White House affects not only the fragile democracy of the United States, but also the global economic and cultural order," she stated. "Horror leaves us without language, without others, without community," she specified. "In moments like these, we have to work with them. As a writer, the power of those humble elements, words, is crystal clear to me; the tremendous influence they can have is fundamental now," she added.
Rivera Garza recalled that Trump's recent "attack" on universities like Harvard is not a "false coincidence, but rather part of a program." The US president has threatened to freeze $2.2 billion in grants if all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are not closed. He also intends to subject certain departments to an external audit. "It is necessary to reactivate the forces that have historically been behind the civil rights and feminist movements and to reclaim public space in the United States," the author also demanded.
