Mother’s Day arrives each year as a celebration with flowers, brunches, handwritten cards and social media posts, but beneath the surface lies something far older and more profound. Across human history, societies have honored the maternal not only as a biological role but as a cultural force: the keeper of memory, the transmitter of identity, the protector, the first teacher, the original artist.
At a moment when the city of San Diego is proposing deep cuts to arts and culture funding, it is worth remembering that the maternal has always been central to how civilizations understand themselves. To defund the arts is, in many ways, to sever that lineage.
The earliest known artistic object depicting a human figure is not a king, a warrior or a priest. It is a mother. The Venus of Willendorf, carved more than 30,000 years ago, is a small limestone figure with exaggerated curves, a celebration of fertility, abundance and the generative power of women.
Archaeologists have found similar figures across continents and cultures: in Mesoamerican clay sculptures, in African fertility carvings, in the Andean Pachamama matrilineal weaving traditions that encode stories of lineage and land. These objects are not merely artifacts; they are evidence that early societies understood the maternal body as sacred, central to survival, and worthy of preservation and of artistic reverence.
Maternal imagery is, in fact, one of the most consistent throughlines in global art history. From the Egyptian goddess Isis nursing Horus, to Indigenous North American traditions honoring mothers such as the Navajo (Diné) Nation, to the Aztec goddess of fertility Coatlicue, to the Catholic Marian iconography that traveled across oceans, the mother figure has always been a vessel for cultural identity and living history. She is the one who carries stories forward.
San Diego’s own arts landscape reflects this lineage. Our region’s artists, especially women, immigrant and borderlands artists have long explored themes of motherhood, cultural inheritance and the nurturing labor that sustains communities. The city of San Diego’s Civic Art Collection, which spans more than a century, “aims to provide meaningful aesthetic experiences while reflecting San Diego’s regional character” and includes works that honor women’s perspectives, and roles as cultural bearers.
Artists such as Mary Belle Williams and her painting of Kate Sessions “the Mother of Balboa Park”, Marianela de la Hoz, Griselda Rosas, Marisol Rendón, Cat Chiu Phillips, Andrea Chung, Nassem Navab-Gojrati, Michelle Moore, Bhavna Mehta, Chitra Gopalakrishnan, Alida Cervantes, Steven Pollack, Hugo Crosthwaite, Katie Ruiz, Manuelita Brown, Frederick Schweigardt’s 1930’s fountain sculpture “modest maidens’ and including Einar and Jamex de la Torre’s Corpus Callosum, in the San Diego Central Library, a vibrant, hybrid glass work that speaks to identity, memory and the connective tissue between cultures, express themes deeply tied to maternal lineage and the transmission of heritage. These are but a few of the outstanding artists and seminal works in the Civic Art Collection of, and for, the people of San Diego and beyond.
Many of these works are quietly placed in branch libraries, parks and civic buildings depicting family, community, identity and intergenerational connection. While not always labeled explicitly as “maternal,” these pieces honor the nurturing forces that shape civic life. They remind us that women, and especially mothers, have always been at the center of cultural continuity.
This is why the mayor’s proposal to eliminate nearly the entire $12 million arts and culture budget is so alarming. It is not simply a fiscal decision; it is a cultural one. It signals that the stories, identities and histories carried by our artists, many of whom are mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, caregivers and cultural workers, are expendable.
Arts and culture funding is a civic responsibility, and public art is how cities remember. It is how we honor the people who built them, how we acknowledge the communities that have been marginalized, and how we imagine a shared future. When we cut arts funding, we are not just trimming budgets. We are erasing memory.
Mother’s Day offers a counterpoint, it is a reminder that nurturing, creativity and cultural memory are inseparable. The maternal is not ornamental, it is foundational. The arts are one of the few public systems that recognize and elevate that truth.
In border cities like San Diego and Tijuana, where identity is layered, porous and complex, the arts serve as a connective tissue, much like the maternal figures who hold families and histories together. They help us understand who we are, where we come from, and what we value. They give young people, especially first- and second-generation and immigrant youth, a sense of belonging and possibility. They preserve the stories that might otherwise be lost.
This Mother’s Day/Dia de las Madres, as we honor the women who nurtured us, biological, symbolic or chosen, we should also honor the cultural infrastructure that preserves their stories. The city’s Civic Art Collection already contains the seeds of this recognition. What it needs now is meaningful investment, not abandonment.
To cut arts and culture funding is to turn away from the very forces that have sustained humanity across millennia. It is to forget that the first artist, the first inspiration we ever honored, was a mother.
San Diego can choose differently. Our mayor and city council can honor this promise by reinstating a level of funding commensurate with the impact of what the cultural sector delivers to the city, and in balance with other departments. We can choose to nurture the cultural life of our city and our region, the way mothers have nurtured families since the beginning of time: with care, with intention, and with the understanding that what we invest in today becomes the inheritance of tomorrow.
Feliz Día de las Madres/Happy Mother’s Day!
Linda Caballero Sotelo is a San Diego-based cultural policy strategist, scholar and advisor working at the intersection of arts, culture, democracy and community belonging. She advises national and international institutions on cultural infrastructure, public policy and civic engagement. She is a research associate of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard, and advisor to New Americans Museum & Immigration Learning Center.
