Pachamama, an indigenous deity of the Andes, represents the earth and has the creative power to sustain life. The human Pachamama also sustains it: with the male seed she sustains the species, gives the initial breath and then allows her creation to fly freely.

Mother’s stories

When fascism arrived in Spain to extinguish the light, Miguel Hernández, the famous goat poet, was imprisoned. His wife sends him a letter in which she tells him that she and her son only have bread and onions. Miguel is upset and writes the poem Las nanas de la cebolla on toilet paper: “A dark-haired woman determined in the moon spills thread after thread over the cradle.” “… don’t collapse, I don’t know what will happen.” “My child was in the cradle of hunger, choked with blood.” Josefina Manresa nursed her son with that blood while her husband languished in despair in his cell, until they left him to die of tuberculosis. They could not close his eyes: after death he wanted to see life. Out of the dark, Frankism ordered his works to be burned, but Josefina kept them in a coffin. She supported her son by working as a seamstress 19 hours a day. He died before her. The pain prevented her from continuing to live normally, because, despite the writer Fernando Pessoa poeticizing that after the death of a child, a mother laughs after a few months and is the same, the mother is not and cannot be the same after the death of the one she carried in her womb, she gave her her milk and her breath. This is the pain that many mothers caught when the war made their children lifeless, and they don’t get over it. So that the mother would not have an extinct fourth child, they wanted to save Private Ryan.

We warmly greet the mothers who are on earth and remember those who are below it.

It was the mothers who complained to the Argentine military dictatorship about the disappearance of their children, and later their remains, when they learned that they had definitely lost them. Every week they manifested their demands in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, as the mother and father of the Restrepo brothers did in Quito demanding to know what happened to their children. They called them crazy, and there were 400 of them. They wore white diaper scarves on their heads. Five of them were kidnapped, tortured and killed. Their generous maternal blood fertilized the struggle. After the end of the sinister regime, they promoted the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for crimes against humanity, and continue to search for their children and grandchildren. Some of them were found, others were still stolen.

Maxim Gorky’s mother, enriched by Bertolt Brecht, at first in fear of the revolution her son is fighting for, understands her without understanding and supports her by taking leaflets to the factory where she works. They are mothers who come out of the four walls.

Magnificent motherhood to contribute to the mother herself, to her own, to humanity; but, to be a woman and realize yourself as a human being, you don’t have to be a mother.

A mother defends her children as herself and even more than that. The lioness works. We warmly greet the mothers who are on earth and remember those who are below it. (OR)