My grandmother never called herself strong. She called herself necessary. There is a difference — and it took me twenty years to understand it. Strength, she would say, is something you perform for others. Necessity is something you simply are. She was the water the family drank. The thread the household ran on. The quiet force that held everything upright while the world tried, repeatedly, to knock it down.
She never marched. She never carried a sign. She never gave a speech. But every morning before anyone else was awake, she was already building the day — already making it possible for the rest of us to live in it.
This Women's Month, I want to talk about her. About all of them. The women who made us — not just the famous ones, not just the ones with monuments and hashtags — but the ones whose names live only in us, carried quietly in our hands, our habits, our stubbornness, our love.
The Inheritance We Don't Talk About
We talk a lot about what women were denied. And we should — the denials were real, and naming them matters. But there is another inheritance, one that runs just as deep, that we don't honor nearly enough:
The inheritance of what they built anyway.
Without permission. Without credit. Without the luxury of being recognized in their own lifetime. They built it in the spaces between what they were allowed — in the kitchen that became a classroom, in the loom that became a language, in the garden that fed the revolution before anyone called it that.
My mother learned to read in secret. Her teacher was her older sister, who had learned from a traveling schoolteacher who stayed one winter. That chain of women, passing knowledge hand to hand in the dark — that is how I came to read. That is how I came to write. That is how these words exist at all.
When I publish something, I am not just publishing for myself. I am publishing for all the women in that chain who never got to.
What They Gave Us Without Knowing
The women who made us didn't set out to leave a legacy. They set out to survive, to love, to provide. But in doing so, they deposited something into us that we are only now beginning to understand how to spend.
Think about what lives in you from the women who came before:
- The hands that know how to make something from nothing — resourcefulness learned through watching, absorbed before you had words for it
- The spine that doesn't bend under pressure — inherited from a woman who couldn't afford to break
- The warmth that opens doors — the radical hospitality of women who turned scarcity into abundance
- The voice that speaks truth quietly — because she learned that loud truth got silenced, but quiet truth took root
- The refusal to disappear — the insistence on being seen, even in small ways, even just by the people you love
These are not soft gifts. These are survival technologies. These are the tools that built civilizations while history was looking the other way.
The Women History Forgot to Name
March gives us a moment to celebrate the women history remembered. And they deserve every bit of that celebration — the pioneers, the trailblazers, the ones who broke walls so the rest of us could walk through.
But hermana — I also want us to pause for the ones history forgot to name.
The woman who kept the community together during famine. The healer who knew which plants could save a life. The mother who worked two jobs in silence so her daughter could go to university. The grandmother who kept the old language alive by telling stories every night until the children finally listened.
They did not make headlines. They made us.
And that is not a small thing. That is everything.
In the Sierra Madre, the women weavers passed patterns down through generations. Not written — carried. In the body. In the hands. Each pattern a kind of prayer, a kind of map, a kind of defiance against forgetting. When I think about the knowledge that almost died because no one thought to preserve it — because it was "just women's work" — I feel both grief and fury in equal measure.
We are the preservation now. We are the archive. To remember them is an act of resistance.
Passing It Forward
Here is what Women's Month means to me, beyond the celebrations and the campaigns and the beautiful speeches:
It is a moment to ask — what am I passing forward?
The women who made us didn't stop at surviving. They planted. They wove patterns they knew they'd never see finished. They started chains of knowledge and love that reached across generations to land in us.
Now it is our turn.
What are you building that will outlast you? What are you passing to the younger woman watching you right now — the daughter, the niece, the mentee, the stranger on the internet who sees herself in your story? What pattern are you laying down for hands that haven't arrived yet?
It doesn't have to be grand. It doesn't have to be historic. My grandmother's greatest gift to me was the way she walked into a room — slowly, without apology, as if she had every right to be there. I have walked that way my whole life without realizing I learned it from her.
How you move through the world is something someone is learning from you right now.
Akitai: Adornment as Memory
At Akitai, we believe jewelry is never just decoration. It is memory made wearable. It is the grandmother's hands around your wrist. It is the mother's voice at your ear. It is the tradition that refused to be erased, reshaped into something beautiful enough to carry into the future.
This Women's Month, when you put on a piece of jewelry — yours, or one that belonged to someone who came before you — I invite you to feel the weight of what it carries. Not just metal and stone, but story. Not just beauty, but belonging. Not just adornment, but inheritance.
Wear it like the tribute it is. Wear it for the women who couldn't.
Every piece of jewelry is a conversation between generations — the woman who wore it before, the woman wearing it now, and the woman who will wear it next.
A Letter to the Women Who Made Us
To my grandmother, who called herself necessary instead of strong — you were both. You were everything.
To my mother, who learned to read in secret and made sure I never had to — every word I write is yours too.
To the weavers of the Sierra Madre, whose patterns I carry in my hands even when I'm not weaving — I see you. I remember you. I will not let you disappear.
And to every woman reading this, who carries the invisible inheritance of the women who came before her — you are the answer to a prayer someone prayed before you were born.
This month, and every month: honor them. Honor yourself. Honor the chain you are part of — the extraordinary, unbroken, uncelebrated chain of women who made the world possible.
You are not here by accident. You are here because they refused to give up.
Now — refuse to give up for the ones who come after you.
Con amor y fierro,
Catalina 🐚
P.S. — Call the woman who made you, if you can. Tell her you see what she built. Tell her it worked. Some words are overdue, and there is no better month than this one to say them.