Maria Auxiliadora Leon Molina

MARIA LEON MOLINA, an independent scholar, Guayaquil, Ecuador, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “A Cartographic Path after Acts of Feminicide: Mothers Seeking Justice for their Daughters.” The research, carried out in Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador, focused from 2023 to 2025 on an ethnographic process with mothers who find and form alliances to demand justice on behalf of their daughters. To understand this journey that tries to recover the memory of their loved ones, interviews were conducted, and the mothers were accompanied in their activities in the field and as part of their shared journey online. The mothers manage to insert themselves into at least three types of alliances recognized in this study as critical maternal alliances with a preponderance of online action and attention, multisectoral and multigenerational alliances for activism in the territory, and collective maternal alliances for legal action. Thanks to these structures, their individual struggles are combined, and they can highlight how the state violates their rights by not prioritizing their cases. Still, at the same time, their collective strength enables them to insert themselves into state institutions so that their demands are heard and addressed, such as benefits for their orphaned grandchildren and notifications to Interpol for the international search for femicides who usually flee Ecuador and remain at large.