Mothers of the Disappeared
Tour	The Joshua Tree Tour
Date	December 19, 1987
Location	Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona
Streaming   Real Audio	8 minutes 38 seconds
Download	1.1 Mb

  
"We're gonna try something new with the last track on 'The Joshua Tree', Mothers of the Disappeared," The Edge tells listeners to Arizona radio the evening before this historic cocert in Tempe.  "We have put some Spanish words together; we're so close to a Spanish speaking part of the world, we felt that maybe people at this concert might pick up on this lyric."  Bono expands on this by saying, "We've always ended our concerts with the song 40, which is a refrain from Sunda Bloody Sunday: 'How long, how long must we sing this song.'  We recorded that on the 'Under a Blood Red Sky' film and record, and it's been a timepiece.  At this concert we're hoping to actually put Mothers of the Disappeared in place of 40 from now on.  We're gonna make the chant a little more difficult: El pueblo vancera, which means: The people united will overcome."  Bono says that these words are the words that the mothers of the disappeared in Central and South America motivate themselves with in their struggle to find out what's happened to their children.  The Edge plays the melody of Mothers on the guitar and sings these words and Bono briefly joins in second voice.  He says, "If the people of Arizona sing this, and if it goes into the film and the record [Rattle & Hum], wherever we go in a way for the next few years, that will be taken up again.  It'll be an interesting experiment; if it doesn't work, it doesn't work."  Evidentally, it didn't work well enough because the song was edited out of the final cut of the movie Rattle & Hum and never was heard performed this way again.  I think, though, that it went remarkably well.