A Leporello of the Maternal Lineage
Some stories are not told in words. They are inherited in silence, in what was left unsaid, in what was carried without a name. This leporello was born from that certainty: that I carry within me not only my own story, but that of countless women who came before me — an ancestral chain that stretches back further than any book could ever hold.
This leporello gathers five of those generations — five visible faces of a lineage that is, in truth, infinite. From my great-grandmother Ana Rita, to my daughter Maia Jane, through my grandmother María Inés, my mother Beatriz Elena, and myself. Five women, five flowers — chosen by intuition, without any rational system to justify them, but by what each woman made me feel when I thought of her — connected by the same red thread that binds them to one another, and that, through them, connects also to all those who came before, even those without a name on these pages.
I am the daughter of a lineage of artist women without recognition. Women who were daughters, wives, sisters, mothers of — but rarely known as themselves. Women who held everything together so that others could shine, often at their own expense. This leporello is also an act of healing: I am healing the pattern of depending materially on a father or a husband to survive, and tracing a different path for those who come after me.
I never knew my great-grandmother Ana; very little is known about her. I lost my grandmother María Inés when I was very young, and I carry only fragments of memory of her. Making this leporello has also been a way of knowing them — of imagining them, of honoring them, of giving them the place they may never have had in life.
This format, the leporello, unfolds like a map: it can be read from beginning to end, or opened completely and seen as a single gesture. Like the life of a lineage itself: linear as we live it, yet whole when seen from a distance.
This is the place where I decide the chain changes shape. I am not breaking the lineage — I am honoring it by continuing it differently. I am still the daughter of the women who came before me, heir to their strength, to their capacity to hold the unholdable. But I no longer inherit their silence, nor the habit of disappearing inside the names of others. I leave that here, on this page, so it travels no further.
To my daughter, I am not handing down a finished healing, but something more honest: proof that the path can be walked differently. I am raising her to believe in herself, in her many gifts, to know that she has been infinitely loved and that she is capable of achieving whatever she sets out to do. Whether she becomes a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister — or whatever she chooses to be — may she be, above all, herself: named, visible, whole.
