Journey · 13 stops
Latin America and the Indigenous Americas
From the Valladolid debate and Nahua song to the decolonial turn: six centuries of thinking in and about the Americas.
Stops
Stop 1 of 13: Bartolomé de las Casas
The conquest raised a question for European law: do the peoples of the Americas have reason, rulers and property of their own? Bartolomé de las Casas, once himself a holder of Indigenous labourers, answers yes. At Valladolid in 1550–51 he argues against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who invoked Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery, that war and forced labour against them are unjust. Earlier he had proposed bringing enslaved Africans instead – advice he later regretted as just as unjust.
Stop 2 of 13: Nezahualcóyotl
The peoples of the Americas had asked their own questions long before – though what survives of them passed through colonial hands. Is anything on earth true and lasting? Songs attributed to Nezahualcóyotl, ruler of Texcoco in the fifteenth century, ask this and answer with “flower and song” (in xochitl in cuicatl): poetry as a way to say something true. Whether he composed them is debated – they survive in Nahuatl collections written down after the conquest – and that they amount to a “Nahua philosophy” is a thesis of Miguel León-Portilla, later reworked by James Maffie. This map records no documented line from these songs to later thinkers.
Stop 3 of 13: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
Around 1615 an Andean author answers in his own name. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala sends the king of Spain a chronicle of almost 1,200 pages with nearly 400 drawings: a history of the Andes, a record of colonial abuse and a plan for good government, in Spanish mixed with Quechua. The Andean world is not defended here but describes itself. The manuscript lay unknown in Copenhagen until 1908.
Stop 4 of 13: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
In the viceroyalty of New Spain the question shifts to who may think at all. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun in Mexico City with a large library, is urged by the bishop of Puebla, writing as “Sor Filotea”, to leave secular learning. Her Reply (1691) defends her drive to know as God-given and lists learned women of the past. Shortly before her death she gave up her library, for reasons still disputed.
Stop 5 of 13: José Martí
After independence the new republics must decide whose ideas to govern by. In “Our America” (1891) José Martí, writing in exile in New York, urges them to know their own peoples – Indigenous, Black, mestizo and rural – instead of copying European or North American models. “There can be no race hatred, because there are no races,” he writes, and he warns of the power of the United States. He fell in Cuba’s war of independence in 1895.
Stop 6 of 13: José Carlos Mariátegui
José Carlos Mariátegui wants a socialism for Peru that is no mere borrowing but a heroic creation of its own. In the Seven Essays (1928) he argues that the “problem of the Indian”, as it was then called, is not a matter of race or education but is rooted in the land system of the great estates – and that socialism can build on the communal traditions of the Andean ayllu. His independent line brought conflict with the Communist International.
Stop 7 of 13: Augusto Salazar Bondy
In 1968 the Peruvian Augusto Salazar Bondy asks bluntly whether there is a philosophy of “our America” at all. Mostly, he answers, it has imitated one European school after another – not for lack of talent but as a symptom of domination and dependence. Leopoldo Zea replies from Mexico in 1969 that reflecting on one’s own situation already is philosophy, “without qualification” (sin más). Their exchange opens the way to a philosophy of liberation.
Stop 8 of 13: Gustavo Gutiérrez
Liberation is first worked out in theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a parish priest in a poor district of Lima, defines theology in 1971 as “critical reflection on praxis in the light of the Word”: poverty is not fate but the product of unjust structures, and the Church must opt for the poor. He later wrote a book on Las Casas, whom he saw as a forerunner – the journey’s first station returns.
Stop 9 of 13: Enrique Dussel
Enrique Dussel, whose house was bombed by right-wing paramilitaries in 1973 and who went into exile in Mexico in 1975, gives liberation a philosophy and a history. Modernity, he argues, began not with the Reformation but in 1492, with Europe’s conquest of America and its “covering-over” of the Other. Drawing on Levinas and Marx, he grounds ethics in the claims of those the system excludes, and debates Apel and Habermas from that standpoint.
Stop 10 of 13: Aníbal Quijano
In 1992 the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano names what outlived the colonial administrations: a “coloniality of power”, in which the idea of race, born in the conquest of America, ranks peoples and allocates labour worldwide. With Walter Mignolo and María Lugones it became the starting point of the decolonial turn.
Stop 11 of 13: Gloria Anzaldúa
On the US–Mexico border Gloria Anzaldúa writes in English, Spanish, Tex-Mex and Nahuatl. In Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) the border is an “open wound” where worlds collide, and from her life as a working-class lesbian Chicana she develops a “new mestiza consciousness” that holds contradictions together. She draws on Aztec figures such as the goddess Coatlicue – the Nahua world of the second station, reclaimed.
Stop 12 of 13: Viola Cordova
The journey turns to Indigenous North America. Viola Cordova, of Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic background and one of the first Native American women with a doctorate in philosophy, sets out the basic framework of a Native worldview in the terms of academic philosophy: the world is a self-sustaining whole, humans are one part of it among others, and ethics means keeping balance in relations with the human and the non-human. Her essays appeared after her death as How It Is (2007). Her dissertation of 1992 had compared the Navajo idea of the Holy Wind with Spinoza’s monism.
Stop 13 of 13: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
From La Paz, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who has worked with Aymara communities since founding the Andean Oral History Workshop in 1983, objects that decolonial theory written in North American universities turns Andean ideas into academic capital. Against tidy mestizaje she sets the Aymara word ch’ixi – a grey made of black and white dots that never merge. Like Guaman Poma four centuries earlier, she speaks from the Andes in her own name.
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made