Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and gender discrimination.

Discussions of Liliana’s freedom recur throughout Rivera Garza’s memoir, constituting a significant motif. Liliana’s writing, especially her compositions from the year before her death, emphasize freedom’s primacy in her thoughts: “Her independence, what she called her freedom, had been a recurring theme in her writings from even before high school, but it emerges in these pages with newfound clarity” (209). Interview excerpts underscore this characterization. Laura Rosales, one of Liliana’s university classmates, recollects thinking of her as a “free woman” who loved life, while Ana Ocadiz, Liliana’s closest friend during her university years, equates Liliana with freedom in her interview. This commitment to independence was, if anything, strengthened by her relationship with Ángel. A later boyfriend, Manolo Casillas Espinal, recalls his struggle to get close to Liliana, who told him that she would not tolerate jealousy and remarked that she valued her “freedom above all” (181). She refused to relive her negative experience with Ángel and would never accept a man’s abusive control again. Liliana’s swimming emerges as a closely related motif due to both the physical grace and strength that the sport requires and the free-flowing nature of the water she moved through.

However, the memoir also shows the concept of freedom to be hotly contested in ways that illuminate the theme of Gendered Violence and Systemic Injustice as Intertwined. Liliana’s family instilled a love of independence in their daughter, and after her death, many would point to this as the root of the problem, arguing that young women’s freedom (particularly sexual) incites male violence. Rivera Garza challenges this victim blaming, arguing that Liliana’s freedom was not to blame. Rather, Ángel’s emotional and physical abuse infringed on her right to be free and ultimately on her right to life itself. In interviews, for example, Liliana’s friend Leonardo Jasso remarks on the lack of freedom that resulted from Ángel’s stalking; likewise, Othón Santos Álvarez recalls Ángel’s constant, sinister presence on the fringes of her life.

A symbolic anecdote about a sparrow illustrates Liliana’s broader relationship to freedom. Rivera Garza recounts a story from Ana in which she and Liliana tried to free a sparrow in Parque Tezozómoc. Liliana purchased the bird in a local market and wanted to release it “somewhere special.” Ana recalls, “She wanted to do a little ceremony. Freedom, she reminded me all the time, was the most important possession in life” (166). However, the bird was dead when Liliana opened the paper bag, a dramatic foreshadowing of her coming circumstances. She lost her life to Ángel’s violence just on the cusp of freeing herself from his abuse.