A woman in the audience wept. She was from El Salvador. She had not spoken of her own village in forty years.
“I painted El Origen as a wound,” says Sofía Márquez, a 34-year-old Chilean-born visual artist now living in Barcelona. Her latest series, Rostros del Principio , depicts faceless figures emerging from cracked earth. “I left Chile when I was nine, during the dictatorship. My parents never spoke of ‘before.’ So I had to invent an origin. Not the traumatic one — the one before the trauma.”
“Western science loves a single beginning,” she told me over coffee in La Paz. “A first cause. A spark. But my grandmother’s stories say there is no first — only cycles. The world has ended and begun again many times. El Origen is not a date. It is a ritual.” El Origen
It is not a map. It is a list: The mango tree behind my house. The crack in the sidewalk where I played marbles. The sound of my mother’s hands making tortillas at 5 a.m.
The lead author, Dr. Elena Quispe (Aymara heritage, Harvard-trained), caused a stir when she refused to call the finding “the origin.” A woman in the audience wept
But for the artists, poets, and migrants who have carried the phrase across borders, El Origen has become something else: a portable homeland.
It is under the floorboards of a demolished home in Michoacán. It is in the recipe for sopa de piedra that no one wrote down. It is in the curve of a river where a boy first learned to swim. It is in the moment before a photograph is taken — the breath held, the future not yet fixed. “I painted El Origen as a wound,” says
The question is not philosophical. It is practical. To forget El Origen — the place where your spirit first recognized itself — is to become untethered. The Earth becomes just rock and soil. The river becomes just water. The corn becomes just food.
“You can lose your papers,” he says. “You can’t lose this.” Linguists note that in nearly every indigenous language of the Americas, the word for “origin” is also the word for “breath” or “beginning of a song.” The Nahuatl īīxiptla (origin) shares roots with ihtoā (to speak). To originate is to speak yourself into being.
In the high, thin air of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, the Arhuaco people do not ask where you are from. They ask: “Do you remember your Origin?”