My sister was lucky to belong to that small group that perpetuates the oral tradition of the stories that populate the Earth from generation to generation, and die until the last person who knows something about them ceases to exist. In the case of Latin America, it seems that it follows in the footsteps of those patriarchal societies whose official history is that of men, while that of women is rarely told. If it is, it is within the four walls of the private sphere, where coffee and biscuits prevail. They do not even earn the secondary space of a seedy bar. No. At a drinks table, when talking about women it is not to exalt them, quite the contrary, it is to reduce them, minimize them. The practice of drinking guaro is a practice of vindication of macho values, even though women participate in it. So it wouldn't be in a corner tavern where my mother's story would be discussed. No. It would be on a Sunday afternoon, with the smell of cheese omelettes with custard and dripping coffee. And my sister was there since she was a child, to hear about my mother, my mother's mother, and the latter's mother. My sister was still there making tortillas with custard and dripping coffee while her two daughters (my mother's two granddaughters) and the daughter of one of them, take care of my mother in the last days of her life.
The lines that follow are my sister's stories. Of these stories, I have heard different versions from different people during the course of my life, but I transcribe what she began to tell me that night in August. I do not add or subtract anything, I do not exaggerate or devalue any of the narratives that follow, nor their protagonists. My sister's memory sometimes fails, but since we met again on several occasions, always to continue talking about my mother, and about seven generations of women who with love and desire to care for the next, allowed me to be who I am, and that many people are who they are, thanks to the fact that, for some reason (which could be justified by any cosmogony, or none), they passed close to my mother's life.