Cihuacóatl Rising: Calling on the Warrior Mother in a Time of Displacement

We are living through a time when Indigenous and Mexican peoples of the Américas are once again being torn from the land that holds our ancestors’ bones. Families are removed from their homes by ICE agents, children taken from their parents at the border—ripped from the arms of their mothers and fathers, community members deported to places they haven’t lived since childhood or ever. The violence feels old—older than the nation-states that pretend to own this land. It echoes the first displacements under colonization, the forced removals, the fracturing of kinship networks. Our people know this wound. It lives in our bodies like a memory we never asked to inherit.

In these moments of rupture, we do not only need the comforting mother, the one who soothes us when the world breaks apart. We also need the Warrior Mother—the one who stands at the threshold with a serpent at her feet and says: You will not cross alone.

This is where Cihuacóatl returns to us.

Anzaldúa mentions her only briefly in Borderlands, but her silence leaves an opening, a space for those of us living these ruptures to understand Cihuacóatl in our own moment. Traditionally, she is a serpent-woman deity linked to birth, death, crossroads, and warrior mothers. She is not the soft maternal figure we sometimes associate with Tonantzin or Guadalupe. She is the fierce mother. The one who protects those passing through dangerous thresholds. The one who knows what it means to fight for the survival of her children.

And today, we are standing at thresholds everywhere—nepantla made literal.
On the borderlands, at detention centers, in the limbo of deportation proceedings, in the ache of separation from family and homeland. We are suspended between worlds, between identities, between the memories of where we come from and the fear of what we may lose next.

In Anzaldúa’s conocimiento, nepantla is the unstable, painful space before transformation. But she never tells us who guards us there. She gives us Coatlicue to explain the visceral shock, the darkness that tears us open—but she does not name the mother who stands at the doorway before that descent. Today, many of us feel that absence. And it is Cihuacóatl who steps forward to fill it.

Cihuacóatl is the sentinel of nepantla, the guardian of those who must cross.
She does not remove the pain—she fortifies us for it.
She walks beside those who migrate, who flee violence, who are forced to start over.
She stands with families torn apart.
She bears witness when the state tries to uproot us from our homelands yet again.

Where Coatlalopeuh–Tonantzin nurtures and anchors us in ancestral belonging, Cihuacóatl gives us the strength to face injustice head-on. These are not rival energies; they are different faces of the serpent mother. Tonantzin holds us. Cihuacóatl defends us. Both are needed now.

As Indigenous people of the Américas—as people whose histories stretch across these continents long before borders—we are experiencing a collective Coatlicue moment. A moment of rupture so deep it shakes identity, family, and spirit. But before Coatlicue’s darkness takes hold, Cihuacóatl is the one who says:

I will guard you.
I will stand at the threshold.
I will walk with you as you cross this danger.
You are not alone.

In calling on her, we are not asking for miracles. We are calling upon ancestral memory, upon the strength of our warrior mothers, upon the knowledge that our survival has always depended on those who refused to let us be erased.

Cihuacóatl rises in us each time we resist displacement.
Each time we reclaim our belonging to this land.
Each time we insist that we are still here, still Indigenous, still connected to the Mother who birthed us.

In a world that keeps trying to tear us from our roots, she reminds us of a truth older than the border:

We are children of this continent.
We carry the serpent mother in our blood.
And we will not be removed again without a fight.