An ode to my grandmother Mamá Tila: The Healer and Teacher of the Volcano.

My grandmother Mama Tila passed away this year in March at the age of 105. Tomorrow is her birthday. 

She was born in Palo Grande, El Salvador on the other side of the Guazapa Volcano from where my father would eventually be born. 

My grandfather didn’t know how to read or write, but she did, so she taught all the children in the village because the nearest school was too far away. 

She gave birth 17 times and thanked God each time for the expanding ability to work the land. 

Then in 1980, she was forced to flee her home when Guazapa was being bombed by US helicopters. Her children had to come get her from the Capital because she did not want to leave her home. Her land. The place where her children’s belly buttons were buried. 

80,000 people were killed or disappeared during that violent twelve year civil war whose epicenter was right in her home on Guazapa. 

I grew up knowing that part of her story. The beginning of my life overlapped with the end of the Civil War and I remember the day the Peace Accords were signed when I was five. What I didn’t know until much more recently was how much she had endured before that. 

In 1932, she was just fifteen years old when 40,000 indigenous campesinos were massacred in just. three. months. 

My gut still drops thinking about that statistic. 

She witnessed the murder of two of her sisters. My great aunts Teresa and Margarita- my name-sake. 

From then on, it was illegal to be Indigenous in El Salvador. People were no longer allowed to practice their Earth based ceremonies…no longer allowed to speak their languages… No longer safe to wear their naturally dyed colors and fabrics.

It became an insult to be indigenous. It became an object of shame. 

Like so many other Salvadorans, she swallowed her ancestral tongue to survive and practiced making medicine incognito. 

I’d like to think that I am her wildest dream. That as I continue leaning into being a healer, her spirit is there healing along with me as I go. All of 60 ish grandchildren and even more great grandchildren are her wildest dreams. What will we do with our wild and precious lives?