Memory is a potent social force, and in Latin America, popular music often has pushed memory to the surface — sometimes like flowers on a grave.

Surely one of the strongest images conjured by the words "Latinas: Women of Latin America" — the name of Tuesday's show at the Moore Theatre — is of mothers lining the streets of Chile and Argentina, demanding to know what had become of their "disappeared" relatives.

Singer/songwriter Mariana Montalvo, whose family fled Augusto Pinochet's Chile in 1974 when she was 20 years old and has lived in Paris ever since, knows that image only too well.

Though her music is not overtly political, the texts she chooses — by such poets as Gabriela Mistral (the first Latin American Nobel laureate in literature) and Cuban Nicolas Guillen — have a seriousness of purpose that begs a deeper reading.

Montalvo is one of the three singers presented by the successful world-music label Putumayo on a 28-city U.S. tour. The other two are Colombian Totó La Momposina and Brazilian Belô Velloso. It should be an exhilarating evening.

Local fans may have seen the lively Momposina at WOMAD USA and most will know the name Velloso, though the sweet-voiced Belô spells it differently than her famous uncle, Caetano, who apparently dropped an "l" from the family name.

Montalvo is probably less familiar.

An earthy alto who combines the allusive imagery and passionate dignity of nueva cancion with the wit and romance of French chanson, Montalvo has been singing and playing guitar since she was old enough to hold one.

Her haunting contribution, "India Song," to Putumayo's recent cross-promotional compilation "Women of Latin America," laments in a husky whisper to "a girl I never met" in a way that suggests the disappeared.

Speaking in a phone interview in an accent as much French as Spanish, Montalvo said of the song, "It's a girl, it's my country, it's a wound, it's all these things. I was very young when I went out of my country. It was very difficult. But I have had a chance to build my grown-up life in France."

Montalvo had her own take on the gender banner of the tour.

"For me, to be feminist is to do in life what you really want to do," she said. "To not have children, not to cook has nothing to do with it. I like to cook. I have children. It's not a problem at all. It is our destiny. My husband is French, and he understands very well that I work away from home for two months. Feminist for me is to be free."

One of the most powerful songs on her last album, "Piel de Aceituna (Olive Skinned)" (World Village), is an adaptation of Jacque Brel's "The Lovers' Song," a paean to lifelong partnership that ends with the wonderfully ambivalent image, "our tender and long war."

Lovers and warriors both, Montalvo says the Latin American women on this tour are particularly strong personalities whom she has enjoyed getting to know.

"All Leos," she said. "Big hair, incredible."