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.