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• 1 2017-08-12T14:58:36-07:00 Comadres as Midwives 30 plain 2017-09-12T15:12:57-07:00 ​Many of the Chicanas had children, so many that it was a common thread in the movement that some women’s issues (bilingual education, day care, public safety, police brutality, high mortality rates in Vietnam) directly related to their Chicano/a children. Comadre, is the Spanish word for “midwife,” but it is a word with much more meaning than someone who helps a woman give birth to a child. Chicanas with young people in their lives, as children, students, and professionals, plant the seeds of feminist consciousness in each conversation, life lesson, and moment of organic pedagogy.
  
  My abuelita taught me the life lessons of respect and dignity as we weeded the rose bushes in her garden. My mother, always told me she never got over the miracle of my birth. She had waited so long for a child, eleven years of marriage without the least glimmer of possibility, and then she had a child. 
  
  When I first held my tiny goddaughter in my arms, I said to myself, “I will never let anything happen to this child.”
  
  I suspect every mother has this moment, when the miracle of birth becomes a reality of responsibility that changes them, moves them to defend the quality of life earned with the right of birth, given to them by their mothers. It moves mothers to join with others, learn of each other’s children’s lives.