The present article explores the concept of 'warrior ethos' as discussed by Norbert Elias to propose an alternative notion of 'warrior ethos' constructed by Brazilian mothers of victims of institutional violence, who identify themselves as 'warrior mothers'. To support the argument, I bring the discussion about black motherhood from Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Davis. This work is the result of a multi-situated ethnography on the political performance of mothers of victims of state violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 2014 to 2018.

There have been extensive studies of the struggles against Latin American military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1980s, especially regarding the activism of mothers of political activists who were disappeared. However there has been far less research about women's continued struggle for memory, truth, and justice in contemporary Latin America. There has been even less consideration of how small-scale urban protesters use memory within urban cultural geographies of activism. This article explores the production of political memory by mothers of victims of state violence in Rio de Janeiro. The mother's struggle encompasses heritage practices in favelas, as well as in the central business district, but deliberately recall and amplify the claims for justice from the 1960s and 1980s. This recalls not only the heritage connected with the dictatorship, but situates their practices within activists' lived experiences of the colonial state and its attempts to render their murdered children criminals.