Las Super Madres de Latino America.

Latin Americans; Mothers; Collective action; Citizenship; Activism; Public demonstrations

The article discusses the role Latinas have had in collectively resisting state violence in Mexico. This article explores the transformation of gendered citizenship into forms of resistance by Latina mothers of disappeared young women in Juarez, Mexico, while comparing their activism with the activist motherist groups in Argentina and El Salvador. The Madres (mothers) in each country acted collectively to transfer empowerment from the private sphere of citizenship reserved for mothers and housewives to the public sphere of motherist activism. Latinas are expected to enact their citizenship in their roles as wives and as mothers raising respectable citizens of the state. Las Super Madres of Latino America, in their confrontation with authoritarian states over the disappearances and deaths of their children, threw off these gendered standards of citizenship assigned them and transformed their roles as mothers into motherist tools against death and oppression. Las Super Madres developed new tools of resistance through the display of objects, photos, and icons, and, claiming a maternalist position, they exposed those complicit or responsible for the atrocities to the scrutiny of the world.