Some coordinates for rethinking our struggles in neocolonial times

Introduction

This paper was presented at the closing conference of In[ter]disciplinadæs: Latin American Congress of Feminist Studies of the South, held from November 18 to 21, 2025, in Montevideo, Uruguay, organized by the Center for Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies (CEIFem) of the Universidad de la República. The aim of this text is to present some coordinates that allow us to reposition our struggles and forms of resistance, as well as the ongoing updates to the system. Only in this way is it possible to understand what is truly at stake today. Although I will take a roundabout route to arrive at the central point of this conversation, I think it necessary to do so in order to grasp the complexity of the moment we are currently living through. It should also be clarified that for this text I revisit various reflections I have developed across different forums and works published between 2012 and 2025, in order to bring them into dialogue with the themes that circulated in the Congress’s spaces of exchange. So below I will try to set down this conversation (as coordinates) to address — following a spiral path — themes and problems of interest to our Latin American region and to Southern feminist debates.

Eastern Coordinate: A (first) necessary positioning

One of the challenges we face when we want to converse within academic spaces is doing so in ways where certainties are neither our starting point nor our destination. That proves enormously difficult, because moving away from “epistemic” certainties toward frank, open dialogues that overflow academic canons tends to generate a great deal of uncertainty for us. It also means opening ourselves to the uncertainty of listening — of accepting the “othered,” the different, the foreign.

Nor are we accustomed to conversations in which ideas keep circulating — that is, where loose threads remain and what has been contributed is not stabilized, or where the tensions, discomforts, inconsistencies, or dislocations opened up by putting our own gazes into play against those that challenge us are left exposed.

It undoubtedly becomes difficult to build reasoning that leaves the questions that energize exchange hanging in the air, without seeking univocal or absolute truths — because sometimes what matters most is not the answer but the question itself. I must therefore make clear that it is not my intention to present reflections built on unappealable or unquestionable arguments — quite the opposite. I believe it is time for us to talk to one another from places where we are not afraid of being “cancelled,” where we can speak our word without it being read as an attempt to silence other voices. I appeal for us to preserve polyphony through feminist dialogues that recognize the crossroads in which we find ourselves at this historical moment. So I want to share with you a set of reflections — not fully woven together nor finished — that move through the “decolonial debate” on the forms of resistance that weave together the anticolonial landscape of our Abya Yala, as well as through debates that trace the long colonial history from feminist perspectives that place at the center the role of genocidal misogynist violence as constitutive of, and constituting, modern patterns of domination.

Southern Coordinate: Second positioning

What use is it to us to draw on the coordinates of the decolonial debate?

What we today call the “decolonial debate” began to take shape as a critical stance of Nuestramérica in the context of the intensification of structural adjustment policies and globalization. Although it would reach its most intense expression toward the first decade of the two-thousands, the decolonial debate cannot be understood apart from the emergence of the continent-wide indigenous movement and the many mobilizations led by Black, Afro-descendant, and racialized women from the glocal peripheries.

One of the debates circulating at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century concerned the civilizational crisis we were witnessing at that historical moment. Recall that, against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the return to electoral democracies in Latin America, and the arrival of neoliberalism, the critical intelligentsia of the Global North interrogated world reality from a postmodern standpoint. Yet what was really at stake was whether we stood at the end of modernity and, therefore, at the threshold of a new stage positioning us “beyond” it — or whether what we were living was one of its recurring crises, and therefore a new cycle of global capitalism. But in Nuestramérica, the prior question had to be: how did modernity arrive on our lands? I consider that question to be foundational to the development of the so-called “decolonial debate” and to some of the intellectual contributions that fall within these coordinates.

Perhaps the “decolonial debate” can be understood as the backdrop against which reflections question the modern-colonial civilizational order, its foundations and supports, from the very standpoint of subaltern subjects. For this reason, none of these contributions could be conceived apart from the anticolonial legacy that precedes them. I would venture to say that the “decolonial debate” flows from many river branches where both traditions of critical reflection and traditions of insurgent action and mobilization converge. In other words, it is part of a long anticolonial tradition that emerges from the very moment the incursions of conquest and colonization began in Abya Yala — since that is also where the history of resistance and rebellion by colonized peoples against colonial imposition begins.

Although we know this is a silenced and deliberately concealed history, it becomes essential to settle the outstanding debt with our own history by recovering the map of Indigenous and Black rebellions — especially those led by women who chose resistance as the path to the survival and continued existence of their/our peoples.

Let these lines stand as a brief account of some women — warrior-Amazons, Mama t’allas, Indigenous and Afro-descendant women — who led, were protagonists of, and/or formed a fundamental part of the struggles against colonial imperial power in this South of our South:

In the Andean world, the case of Bartolina Sisa stands out — an Aymara woman who in 1780 led one of the most important rebellions against colonial powers. Sisa distinguished herself as a political-military commander, and — first alongside Túpac Katari and later alone — commanded an army made up of thousands of Indigenous people from the Andean native nations, which kept Chuquiago (present-day La Paz) under siege for nearly eight months until she was taken prisoner.

To this list are added the names of many Indigenous and Afro-descendant women who fought to defend their peoples against the Spanish and Portuguese invasions or to throw off the colonial yoke. Among them we find: Anacaona, cacique of Jaraguá, one of the first women who fought against the invaders on the island of Hispaniola; the Afro-descendant Guiomar, who fought alongside her companion (Negro Miguel) in the first slave rebellion in present-day Venezuela, in 1552; Janequeo, a woman of Mapuche-Pewenche origin, who fought against Spanish troops in 1587; Huillac Ñusca, a Kolla princess who led the uprising of a group of Incas taken to Chile as slaves to work in the silver mines of Huantajaya. Centuries later, in 1803, Abimañay, together with Jacinta Juárez and Lorenza Peña, led a rebellion against tribute payments in Guamote and Columbe, Ecuador, under the cry: “Let us rise up, let us reclaim our land and our dignity.” These are only some of the names of women, warrior-Amazons, Mama t’allas, Indigenous and Afro-descendant women, who led and formed part of the struggles against colonial imperial power. (Ochoa 2014)

All of these rebellions should also be read as part of the anticolonial and decolonial legacy rooted in the horizons of meaning of Amerindian and African worlds. The “decolonial debate,” then, must be understood and read in light of this long history of Amerindian and African-matrix resistance, as well as the critical contributions of anticolonial Latin American thought and the contributions of racialized women and populations, whose commitments have appealed to other forms of relationality based on principles of communality and the reproduction of life (as against the necropolitics configured by the colonial enterprise).

The decolonial debate cannot be reduced to a handful of (male) intellectuals affiliated with universities of the North or the global Souths. Recognizing our insurgent genealogies — those that were denied and erased — is a pending and necessary task in order to position the long decolonial legacy that exists in our territories. And, in this sense, it should be said that Indigenous, Black, and Afro-descendant women thinkers and activists have also built and contributed to the debates inscribed within what is called decolonial thought, as well as to the feminist projects produced and constructed from Abya Yala. Suffice it, for now, to mention the contributions of Indigenous and/or native peoples’ companions such as: Aura Cumes, Lorena Cabnal, Emma Chirix, Gladys Tzul Tzul, Leiria Vay, Delmy Cruz, Carmen Cariño, Josefa Sánchez, María Patricia Pérez Moreno, Yásnaya Aguilar, Moira Millán, Elisa Loncón, Melania Canales, and Adriana Guzmán, to name only a few.

From this positioning, I would also venture to say that the “decolonial debate” cannot be pigeonholed as a “Theory” or a “School of thought,” because in reality it is not one. It represents, in any case, a set of coordinates that, from their various projections, allow us to reach a clear and grounded understanding of the mechanisms, devices, forms, structures, and continuities of modern-colonial power in its structural and structuring dimension — and, therefore, it makes visible possible ways out of the civilizational order that has been produced over the past 500 years.

However — and running counter to what has been argued above — in recent years a tendency has begun to emerge in academia to theorize “from” the decolonial standpoint, which is interesting but strips this reflective project of explanatory power, since it narrows its own scope. In this sense, I insist on the relevance of recognizing, within the decolonial commitment, the coordinates that allow us to map domination — serving as backdrops for problematizing and dismantling the hierarchies and social markings that bear on the materiality, bodies, territories, knowledges, and subjectivities that have been colonized and subalternized. Daring to make the “decolonial debate” a sounding board for grasping the forms and dimensions of power and domination remains a challenge whose full potential has yet to be shown, so there is still much to expect from the decolonial project. Along these lines, some feminisms (which have taken up and embraced the coordinates of the “decolonial debate”) expose and make visible the logics of domination that organize social hierarchies and inequalities through the analysis of colonial domination patterns that cut across markers of race, class, gender, heteronormativity, ableism, etc. From there also emerges the need to make the “decolonial debate” a mirror through which fissures can open for understanding present-day realities in light of the patterns of domination configured by that past which constitutes us.

Western Coordinate: Third positioning

Colonial echoes of the present

As the Honduran political scientist Breny Mendoza (2014a) notes, in the last two decades of the twentieth century the Latin American region underwent an intense process of liberalization of national economies, accompanied by significant actions aimed at dismantling military dictatorships (wherever they still prevailed) and pushing forward so-called “democratic transition” processes, or returns to electoral democracy, which enabled states to be inserted into the new rules of the global game. This was driven by transnational bodies that encouraged “democratizing” governments to implement so-called structural adjustment policies. As Breny Mendoza puts it:

(…) the 1980s, considered the lost decade for Latin America in economic and social terms, was paradoxically characterized by a successive return of electoral democracies. Democracy returns in Argentina in 1983; in Uruguay and Brazil in 1985; in Chile in 1988; and even in Paraguay in 1989. In countries such as Peru and Honduras, electoral democracy had returned a few years earlier (1980), already offering some indication of how electoral democracy could preserve the very functions of authoritarian military regimes while simultaneously imposing the neoliberal project. (Mendoza 2014a, 243)

By the 1990s, what came to be known as neoliberalism reached its most intense expression, both economically and politically. It marked the beginning of a stage that would bring with it the implementation of trade-opening policies and tariff liberalization (that is, structural adjustment) in response to the crisis of the import-substitution model. This entailed the retrenchment of national states and the restructuring of social policy, with significant exclusionary effects on Indigenous, impoverished mestizo, and Afro-descendant populations — populations that make up the map of our continent’s racial stratification.

Without a doubt, this shift in direction by Latin American national states had a notable impact on racialized popular sectors, which soon organized and rallied around social movements — such as the continent-wide Indigenous and Afro-descendant movement, but also, and above all, around expressions of mobilization and collective action led by racialized women and/or women from popular sectors.

But as Blanca Rubio (2016) rightly notes, by the year 2003:

(…) world capitalism entered a phase of transition… owing to the so-called “dot-com” crisis in Asia and the beginning of the rise in oil and raw-material prices. Both phenomena signaled the onset of the decline of the accumulation regime that had taken root globally since 1982, characterized by the dominance of financial over productive capital, the control of oil and raw-material prices by the United States, and the dominance of corporate enterprises through commercial deregulation. (Rubio 2026, 19, emphasis in the original)

From then until now we have witnessed — as Rubio already noted in 2016 — “the decline of the neoliberal model and the emergence of another, still nascent, accumulation regime” (Rubio 2026, 19). Along these lines, I want to propose that today we are witnessing the closing of the cycle of neoliberal globalization, while at the same time witnessing the renewed attempt by the United States and the so-called “powers” of the Global North to re-functionalize the system that has been sustained for the past five centuries, and which has secured their hegemonic position in multiple ways.

But this two-track process does not entail a definitive abandonment of neoliberal rationality or of cold economic calculation. On the contrary, whatever remains functional to the strategic interests of big capital (managed globally from the centrality of the market) is preserved, while certain elements associated in part with the developmentalist statist model are reinstated (for example, the restoration of tariffs, administrative and economic barriers, and so on) — though now stripped of the principles that once sustained protectionist states of an earlier era. Thus, the crumbling of certain neoliberal policies in no way signifies the collapse of the system. On the contrary, it represents the system’s reconfiguration under imperial/neocolonial dynamics that seek to recover and/or maintain control over territories, bodies, and subjectivities.

The true nature of the states referred to — by some political analysts — as “post-neoliberal” reveals itself as an attempt by these states to position themselves as powerful military-corporate-financial structures serving the interests of legal and illegal networks of power and money.

It must be noted that over the past five years, some state entities have almost entirely shed the substantive principles that once defined national states (such as social justice and the defense of sovereignty). Argentina and — more recently — the United States are cases in point. Yet it must also be noted that these military-corporate states continue to operate within the structural relationship of asymmetric interdependence between so-called central and peripheral countries. And, in this scenario, the United States — under the new mandate of Donald Trump — seeks, at all costs, to maintain its privileged place in the articulation of policies of military coercion, embedded in dynamics of economic-financial speculation linked to the legal and illegal extractivist networks of commercial and human trafficking at the global level.

Undoubtedly, in the current dual-natured dynamic of the system, imperialism and colonialism reproduce themselves through the repertoires of the neofascist right and imperialist-style governments. And in its apparent paradox, this guarantees the perpetuation of a power that has shown no shame in dismantling the emancipatory fictions that sustained the modern-colonial civilizational project — that is, the banners of democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and the recognition of cultural and gender plurality, among others.

The owners of power and money have dropped their masks to reveal their true face. The genocide in Palestine — perpetrated by Israel’s Zionist regime, led by Netanyahu — and the siege against Venezuela (and now against the Caribbean, Colombia, and Mexico) by the United States both demonstrate this. Both expressions of contemporary colonialism allow us to identify the historical pillars of modern/colonial domination: the radical denial of all non-Western existence, or of anything that departs from andro-Eurocentric and andro-US-centric parameters.

The principle of the annulment of otherness has been a historical constant, indelibly imprinted on our memory. And it is remarkable for its capacity to remain a reference principle across different phases of capitalist development, adapting to the political and cultural logics of each era.

Today, the logics of the annulment of otherness are expressed in very diverse ways — for example: femicide, forced disappearance, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, neo-slavery, and, of course, genocide and imperial and neocolonial wars, among many others. In all of these cases, what underlies them is the persistence of a gaze that turns otherness into a threat, and therefore into an “enemy,” making it an object of control and extermination.

Correspondingly, the practices of annulling the other constitute manifestations of colonial domination patterns that conceive certain bodies and territories as disposable, cancellable, penetrable, and available for plunder, appropriation, and exploitation.

The continuity of colonial domination patterns is part of the contemporary dynamics of power expressed, I insist, in the genocide perpetrated against the population of Palestine and in the ongoing, systematic siege against Venezuela. For this reason, it becomes all the more necessary to read current processes in light of the criteria and cores of meaning of the modern-colonial-gender world-system. Only in this way is it possible to understand what is truly at stake today. It also calls on us as feminists to rethink the not merely anti-patriarchal but also anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and antimilitarist character our own struggles must have. But it also calls on us to rethink the grounds on which the (renewed) practices of violent appropriation of bodies, territories, and existences in our Souths rest.

Northern Coordinate: Misogynist-genocidal violence

Daniele Giglioli, in his book Critique of the Victim, states that whoever is condemned to repeat the past is not the one who fails to remember it, but the one who fails to understand it (2018, 19). In this coordinate I would like to draw on reflections that can help us understand the logics of domination that, a little over 500 years ago, called into question the very condition of humanity of Amerindian populations and of people of African origin (brought to these lands in conditions of slavery).

As we all know, colonized populations were stripped of the status of humanity through the establishment of various devices sustained by patterns of inferiorization-feminization-racialization, applied to entire populations (and not only to a sector of the population marked by its sex-gender condition).

For more than a decade and a half, through the analysis of certain sixteenth-century theological discourses, I have tried to show how the Indigenous man/woman was feminized — that is, dehumanized and constituted as a not-fully-a-subject, and therefore as a being who could be governed, penetrated, exploited, and annihilated. This has as its reference point the colonial event in its misogynist-genocidal imprint, whose primary referent is an “other” who is, in fact, a nearby other — namely, the women of European Christendom. The mechanisms of domination historically exercised over them constitute the model that was taken up, adapted, and applied to colonized populations.

In some chronicles of the conquest and sixteenth-century theological discourses we find the record of the colonial coordinates of domination. For example, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas states in his Tratados that the conquest of America was a war of barbarity, a true massacre. He thus identifies genocide as one of the two methods used by the Spaniards, to which are added andro-European domination patterns that end up transfiguring gender markings into race. I include a passage from his work that may shed light on this:

Two general and principal methods have been used by those who have gone there [to America], who call themselves Christians, in extirpating and erasing from the face of the earth those wretched nations. One, through unjust, cruel, bloody, and tyrannical wars. The other, after having killed all who might yearn or sigh or think of liberty, or escape the torments they suffer — namely the natural lords and the men (for commonly they leave alive in the wars only the young and the women) — oppressing them with the harshest and cruelest servitude in which men or beasts have ever been placed. To these two forms of infernal tyranny may be reduced and resolved, or subordinated as to their kinds, all the other diverse ways of assailing those peoples, which are countless. (Las Casas 1997, 21; emphasis in the original)

In defining the two ways in which the conquistadors tried to subdue Indigenous men and women in order to annex them to the control of the Spanish Crown, Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas is also describing two facts on which the colonialism that gives rise to the modern-colonial-capitalist and gendered world-system rests. First, the matter of genocidal and exterminating wars materialized in the annihilation of an alterity represented as risk or threat. Second, the subjugation of surviving colonized populations under domination patterns originally used against the women of Western Christendom, who were seen as weak and harmless. The devices of domination directed at this nearby “other” served as reference points in the processes of appropriation and exploitation of Amerindian populations and populations of African origin, through mechanisms such as servitude and slavery. It should be noted, however, that with the colonial event these devices took on new nuances, taking as their touchstone the appropriation of the entire life of colonized people, giving shape to processes of accumulation by dispossession that would set the pattern for the development of capitalism.

It is clear that Indigenous men represented an alterity that had to be physically eliminated because — from the colonizer’s imaginary — they could generate opposition and resistance to the invasion. The colonizers did not see in women the figure of resistance, owing to their own frame of meaning regarding the feminine. This had very specific implications regarding the annihilation of Indigenous men and, of course, the use of misogynist violence (specifically rape) as a mechanism to ensure the subjugation of women and feminized people within the colonial project.

Given these coordinates, it is not difficult to understand how patterns of colonial power were constituted through the transfer of domination devices that had weighed on the women of medieval Christendom onto the colonized populations of the misnamed “New World.” Thus, with the colonial event, domination devices that before 1492 had been used against feminine bodies were displaced and applied against entire populations that were not read primarily through their gender condition but were instead marked by racial markers. This means that with the colonial event, the sex-gender marker as an indicator of inferiorization is symbiotically transfigured into racial markers. From then on, both markers operated in an interwoven manner, sustaining a hierarchizing social dynamic in which they mutually constitute one another within the materiality of colonized peoples’ lives. Hence the importance of recognizing the intersection of oppressions (by markers of race, class, gender, mandatory heteronormativity, ableism, etc.).

And although this clearly bears an ontological-dehumanizing imprint on colonized subjects, there is another dimension I wish to highlight here — specifically, the link between destructive, misogynist, and genocidal violence implicit in the processes of annulling and negating the “non-European.”

The Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres — following the Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter and Joshua Goldstein — argues that the conquest of Nuestramérica is an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in times of war, and reproduces what Goldstein considers necessary for understanding colonial imposition: male sexuality as a cause of aggression; the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and dependence on the exploitation of women’s labor (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 139). Maldonado-Torres argues that:

(…) these three elements combine powerfully, and become naturalized in relation to the idea of the intrinsic inferiority of subjects of color, within the idea of race that begins to emerge and spread globally from the conquest and colonization of the Americas onward. Misanthropic skepticism defines its objects as racialized sexual beings. Once such beings are defeated in war, they come to be seen as perpetual servants or slaves, and their bodies become part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The ethic of the ego conquiro [I conquer] ceases to be merely a special code of conduct, legitimate in times of war, and becomes, in the Americas — and gradually across the entire world — by virtue of the idea of race and the coloniality of power, a form of conduct that reflects the way things simply are… The modern conception of the world is closely tied to the idea of the world under conditions of conquest and war. Modernity is characterized by an ambiguity between a certain secular humanist impetus and the radical betrayal of certain dimensions of that same impetus, owing to its relationship with the ethic of war and its naturalization through the idea of race. The idea of race legitimates the non-ethics of the warrior long after the war has ended, indicating that modernity is, among other things, a perpetual process of conquest carried out through the ethic that characterizes it. (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 139; emphasis in the original)

While the argument of Maldonado-Torres’s article revolves around the “coloniality of being” and its bearing on racial experience, it undoubtedly helps us advance certain reflections that frame, on one hand, the role of genocidal misogynist violence as an element of power that “lies at the very heart of the modern experience” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 132).

Perhaps the only problem we find in Maldonado-Torres’s reasoning is that, although he identifies the processes of genocidal violence as well as the process of the colonial feminization of the colonized other, he treats this as a consequence rather than as a starting point in the configuration of the new modern-colonial order.

That is, he does not view it as a constitutive element of coloniality, and therefore of the modern system and its universalizing Ethos, but rather as a recurring practice associated with the behavior of conquistadors and colonizers. By contrast, seen from a decolonial feminist perspective, misogyny — and its embodiment in genocidal violence — is a substantive element of modern-colonial domination patterns and not merely their consequence; that is, it is structuring as much as it is structural to the system of domination.

With Nelson Maldonado-Torres, we share the claims that point to the clear articulation between the feminization/sexualization and racialization of colonized populations, insofar as the process of inferiorizing “others” occurs through mechanisms and devices of subjugation that turn Amerindian and African peoples (kidnapped and brought to Our America) into racialized “sexual objects,” and their bodies into objects of “sexual abuse, exploitation and control” (Maldonado-Torres 2007). But beyond what our author proposes, we consider that making visible the colonial feminization/sexualization/racialization of the Indigenous other, and the misogyny inscribed in genocidal violence — not merely as “codes of conduct” but as constitutive elements of the modern colonial Ethos and Pathos — allows us to grasp the relations of domination structured by the colonial order. Nor can we forget that the process of dehumanizing Indigenous people translated into logics of annulment and appropriation of the non-Western “other” that proved substantive to pan-European colonialism, whose persistence remains visible to this day.

We know that acts of annihilation were carried out against non-European colonized populations by way of misogynist-genocidal violence, while devices of annulment/appropriation simultaneously operated against those who survived the techniques of colonial terror and horror (women, children, and young men).

One of the paths for the annulment/appropriation of that non-European other was to fix them within an essentialized ontological place that assigned them the inalienable condition of incivility, barbarism, non-humanity, and lack of “reason.” In this way, colonized people were prevented from reproducing their worlds and recreating themselves according to their own codes and frames of meaning (Quijano 2001), placing them beyond any possibility of validating their existence, their ethos, and their epistemes.

It is worth noting that the process of ontologization — as a mechanism of domination (Ochoa 2024) — operated differentially among colonized populations, as mentioned above. And with it, various forms of negation of the non-European other were produced, though always under the same ontological principle: the non-humanity of the Indigenous and Black person.

The processes of annulment/dehumanization take on central relevance in the (sexual) appropriation of the bodies, territories, and existences of colonized people, and come to form the basis of methods of plunder and exploitation.

These colonial dynamics of power and domination configured what the Hispano-Syrian thinker Sirin Adlbi Sibai (2016) calls: the Empire of the annulment of the Other. This monological empire, which “in addition to having colonized power, being, knowing, and dwelling (spatio-temporal coloniality), and existing on a global scale, imposes on us a knowledge of the diversity of the world through a racist, patriarchal, sexist, military, and capitalist hierarchical scale” (Adlbi 2016, 85). Thus:

When the West represents us and speaks on our behalf through the power granted to it by having colonized us physically and materially after establishing itself as the “center of the world,” in that very act we die; we cease to exist. We “do not exist” and we “are not,” since one can only “be” when one has the capacity to “speak” and to represent oneself (which implies a location, a place of enunciation). We are thus under the yoke of Western monologue. (Adlbi 2016, 85)

Now, what has been argued above is not a minor point if we recognize that the colonial event reveals to us the core of meaning of power and domination. And this core rests on, and refers us back to, the principle of the annulment of otherness, insofar as it is represented as a foreign, monstrous, demonic, uncivilized, cannibalistic, exotic exteriority, and so forth, that configures the other as threat, stranger, enemy. And, without a doubt, this remains the basis on which the system is reconfigured and updated today — which is why it is now more necessary than ever to think of alternatives grounded in other frames of meaning.

Middle Coordinate: When our North is the South

Indigenous, Black, and Afro-descendant movements across Latin America and the Caribbean have opened important breaches in the grammar and arithmetic of power. Amerindian and African-matrix horizons of meaning reposition us with respect to the criteria for building our own political commitments. That is why, when we speak of the Pachamama (from Andean ancestrality) or the Mother-Earth (from the Mesoamerican world), these are not metaphors — they are part of horizons of meaning in which the criteria for understanding ways of existing in the world are neither univocal, androcentric, nor anthropocentric. Therefore, understanding the multiple forms of existence does not pass solely through the dimensions of the human, but also through those of the non-human (including intangible beings). For this reason, struggles cannot be reduced, for example, to the problem of the environment alone, even though they include it.

But then, how do we translate these frames of meaning into political commitments for transformation? “Good living” (Sumak Kawsay), the Zapatista principle of “leading by obeying,” the communality of the Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, (Maya) nosótrica philosophies, among many others, form part of the paths opened up from which political alternatives are formulated that carry a high degree of responsibility toward human and non-human alterities. It also falls to those of us who — for historical reasons — are not part of ancestral communities, to take responsibility for and with others, as well as to assimilate the meanings of the new grammars of protest that challenge us regarding the senses of risk and vulnerability experienced as markers of domination, and to make the shifts needed in our understanding of power and domination. This is a task that must be carried out from our own trenches (whether local communities, neighborhoods, networks, collectives, or family or work spaces).

Feminists face the same challenge, but it also falls to us to contribute to the understanding of new forms of domination (through shifts in the understanding of power) and to carry out the pedagogical work needed to untangle the knots and possibilities of our struggles in defense of interconnected lives and the recognition of the multiple forms of existence in this world.

Note: The Spanish-language original of this article was first published in Revista nuestrAmérica: Ochoa Muñoz, K. (2026). “Algunas coordenadas para repensar nuestras luchas en tiempos neocoloniales.” Revista nuestrAmérica, (27), e18263715. https://n2t.net/ark:/53698/18263715. This English version was translated from the original with the assistance of Claude, for the War Law Institute.

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