Through the veins of Isabel Pantoja’s mother, Ana Maria Villegas, ran the same artistic blood as her daughter. ‘Dona Ana’, as the press baptized her, was a great flamenco dancer of gypsy race although born in Portugal who married Juan Pantoja Chiquetete, from Algeciras, son of the cantaor Pipono from Jerez. For him and for his four children –Isabel was the only girl–, he left the stage. He had a promising career because he got to dance in the company of Juanita Reina.Widowed at a very young age, he had to support his family through many hardships. But when he realized his daughter’s potential, he bet everything on her andHe passed on his love, experience and energy to her in order to make her the star of the song that she is now.
When Isabel began to succeed, dona Ana became the epitome of the mother of folklorica : she accompanied her daughter everywhere and watched over the honor of the artist. Everyone knows that every man who wanted to pay homage to the young tonadillera had to first pass through Dona Ana’s exam, who took care of her daughter’s honor. Until the arrival of Julian Munoz and the entire Marbella plot, it was common to see her in the dressing room ironing her daughter’s batas de cola.
Your Maribel, as she always called her, was her little right eye, and her daughter felt similar love and admiration for her. That is why there is no doubt about the bad moment that the tonadillera must be going through when facing a life, for the first time without her mother, an icon of an overprotective parent in Spain half a century ago.
Isabel’s time in prison was especially hard for the woman and her health began to progressively weaken since the folkloric criminal sentence was carried out. For Isabel, her year and four months in prison were even harder knowing that her mother experienced that time as the worst stage of her life. In 2019 he suffered a stroke.It was after Isabel’s participation in Survivors, before which she had already suffered a first notice.Too many upsets and controversies for a lady accustomed to the stage, but not to television sets, much less to the courts.
Pantoja’s mother is a phrase that will always remain in popular culture because everyone knew the way in which Ana Marin went out of her way for her daughter and took care of every detail of her life and her professional career. An extreme care that Isabel has returned to him until the end of his days. I also exercised as a selfless grandmother; her grandchildren Kiko, Isa and Anabel, the most famous, have never had a bad word about her. Her last years were spent locked up in Cantora, scene of the success, and at the same time the failure, of her Maribel.