Liza Bakewell - MADRE: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun

While studying in Mexico in the late 80s and 90s, linguistic anthropologist Liza Bakewell became obsessed with Mexicans’ use of the word madre in all its forms—un desmadre, a major disaster; de poca madre, great; vale madre, worthless; dar en la madre, give it in the mother (the weak spot).  Her madre list growing by the day, edited and updated during cab rides, weddings, dinner parties, art studio visits, trips for tamales, and in conversation with friends and colleagues, Bakewell began asking: Why can’t a bien educada lady in Mexico say the word madre without raising eyebrows?  How could madre mean whore as much as virgin?  What happens to the ninety-nine madres when one father enters the room and they become a group of padres?  How is it that parto (childbirth) is masculine, not to mention el love, el marriage, el sex, el pregnancy?

In thematically organized chapters titled Love, Mixed Messages, Food Fight, Lost in Los, Sounding it Out, Explaining What Happened, and Looking Back, Bakewell merges memoir with linguistics as she chronicles the evolving meanings of the word madre—heavily influenced by the Church’s often fraught relationship with the Mexican State, she argues.  In wildly lively prose rich in wordplay and attitude, Bakewell celebrates language and the role of the creative female in a sexist culture.

Liza Bakewell is a linguistic anthropologist at Brown University. Her writing has appeared in Words without Borders, Humanistic Quarterly, Frontiers, American Anthropologist, the Encyclopedia of Mexico, www.mesolore.net and other publications.