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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.
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. El Origen
But for the artists, poets, and migrants who have carried the phrase across borders, El Origen has become something else: a portable homeland. The question is not philosophical
She pulled a small stone from her pocket — a ch’alla offering stone, worn smooth. “This was my grandfather’s. He said it came from the beginning. But he also said the beginning is always happening. Every time you plant a seed, you return to El Origen.” Perhaps the most poignant version of El Origen belongs to those in movement. On the northern border of Mexico, inside a migrant shelter in Tijuana, a 17-year-old from Honduras named Carlos has drawn his origin on a cardboard bunk. The Earth becomes just rock and soil
The lead author, Dr. Elena Quispe (Aymara heritage, Harvard-trained), caused a stir when she refused to call the finding “the origin.”
His drawing has been torn twice — once by border patrol, once by accident. He has taped it back together each time.
“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.”
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