About the Decolonial Thought Community in Latin America

The Decolonial Thought Community is a Latin American collective network of political action and decolonial thought based in Mexico and Ecuador. Born as an idea on June 7, 2017, it was originally conceived as a small online hub to spread the decolonial question and translate some articles and recorded lessons of some Latin American decolonial thinkers who remained invisible in discussions outside Latin America, but we were also interested in contributing to the contact between the different decolonial traditions of the global south. At first, the Ecuadorian anthropologist René Toapanta Mejía (Salesian Polytechnic University) who had a special interest in Latin American colonial history and the Mexican economist Ulises Tamayo Pérez (Polytechnic State University of St. Petersburg) who at that time carried out a critical research on social economy from the decolonial point of view, engaged in that project creating the site Decolonial Thought Community which has currently over 1800 members. In November 2017, following our participation in a forum where the importance of the relationship between feminism and coloniality was discussed, we established bonds of affinity with the Mexican internationalist Milén Aragón Dominguez (Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla), who came into contact with decolonial critiques while studying the communitary feminism, she soon joined the community. After some meetings and reflections we glimpsed the need for a shift to local action, from then on we tried to open spaces for discussion of the decolonial question. In February 2018 we inaugurated at the Autonomous University of Tlaxcala (Mexico) the first diploma course on Decolonial Studies in the country and probably in the continent, it was a free course that lasted around 6 months and to which around 25 people attended, the course allowed us to establish links with activists and local academics. In April 2018 we took part in the congress “Thinking psychology in the light of our realities”, putting on the discussion table the relationship between gender and coloniality; In January of the following year we organized a seminar on the rebellions in colonial America, a reading from Walter Benjamin’s diachronic-political analysis to which even attendees from nearby cities attended and at the same time we began to organize the second edition of the Diploma in Decolonial Studies inviting notable Latin American decolonial thinkers, this event did not take place due to some administrative requirements within the universities that would host the project, on May 9 of the same year we held a conversation session with Nelson Maldonado about the Coloniality of Being at the Center of Studies for Economic and Social Development of the Autonomous University of Puebla (where Milén Aragón and Ulises Tamayo carry out their Phd studies), between July 15 and 17 we organized a small Introductory Course to Decolonial Thought with around 40 attendees from different cities, also, during the summer, we committed ourselves to lead some study groups of left-wing political activists in some municipalities of our state. During the course of these activities we have been weaving links with activists, collectives and organizations (feminists, students, politicians and cultural) at the local level, for us are both important, articulation and political praxis, of course, we believe in the grass roots activism and autonomies, but we also believe in the intervention and action at the macro institutional level and we are conscious too of the necessity to consider the geopolitical situation in a global level, therefore, we are interested in the intercultural dialogue and the linkage, above all of the Global South.