Las Super Madres de Latino America: Transforming Motherhood by Challenging Violence in Mexico, Argentina, and El Salvador

Abstract

This essay examines the role Latinas have had in collectively resisting state violence and control through their roles as mothers of desaparecidos, the "disappeared." Although Latinas throughout the Americas are known to be activists in social movements and have protested forms of state control imposed on them as citizens for decades, this role of Latinas as mothers and resisters of state control has not been fully researched. Historically, Latina mothers' responsibilities and assigned roles are strictly placed within the confines of the home and the workplace, and they are forbidden by gendered norms and standards of citizenship to use their status as mothers for anything other than the proper rearing of their children. Yet, the treatment of their children's bodies as disposable and their children's ultimate deaths prompted these women to challenge state institutions of power and violence against its citizens.