Decolonial Thought & Praxis

Building a World Where Many Worlds Fit

I am from the South of the Global South

I come from a village located in southern Honduras in the mountainous region bordering Nicaragua. It’s a place where collective social existence (or convivencia) remains despite colonialism and neoliberal globalization. Although somewhat isolated from the rest of Honduras, in the 1980s this region found itself amidst a geopolitical conflict led by an unknown monster up North. Our region became a strategic point to deploy a contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. With Battalion 316 torturing, killing, and disappearing people, I cannot blame my mom for deciding to leave our village to go pursue the “American Dream” within the entrails of the same monster (José Martí) responsible for devouring us into its geopolitical designs.

Leaving one’s place, as some of you have experienced, is one of the most painful things to endure. To be displaced by civil wars or contra wars as was the case for many of us in Central America is a wound that truly never heals. Yet, when you’re willing to join those who continue to resist colonialism and racial capitalism, things begin to look more hopeful. When you’re willing to listen to those on the receiving end of these interconnected systems of domination and exploitation, you also begin to realize that they’re the ones who will teach you how to read, interpret, interrogate, and unsettle the colonial-capitalist order of things. No one else will do it for us, nor should we expect them to.

Heading North/Looking South

After a long journey through Mexico, my family and I made our way to southern California (LA) where I lived undocumented for the next 18 years. In those long 18 years, I didn’t only learn about the collective sense of belonging gangs provided (as I too formed part of one) but also the misplaced collective power and misdirected violence I would later learn was intimately related to colonialism. In California, I learned firsthand about the cruel reality of being incarcerated. This experience didn’t last very long but long enough to get a close look at how power can be held in a few hands and wielded systematically against colonized and negatively racialized subjects who are made to feel like objects destined to live in the zone of nonbeing—nothingness.

In 2008, my older brother was also arrested and imprisoned. His fate was different than mine, however. He was deported and separated from his family, including his three-year-old daughter and son. In 2009, a US-backed coup overthrew the president of Honduras. Both events convinced me to return to my village. It was time to get the fuck out…out of the entrails of a settler colonial and imperial monster many people refer to as the land of the free! Staying, as I thought then, was tantamount to complicity. Now I know things are a little more complex. In any case, I bought a one-way ticket to Honduras without the possibility of coming back…so I thought.

This was the time I’d been waiting for. It was time to do something to help change Honduras. In my early 20s, I naively thought I, Jairo Funez, would help transform Honduras. I would surely become the next Che Guevara!

Radical transformation doesn’t come that easy, and it isn’t an individual project but one that requires collective action and organization. It involves redirecting our misplaced anger toward the structures responsible for our suffering. Radical transformation can also begin with small gestures such as being helped by comrades who notice you are about to pass out because the cloud of teargas is suffocating you during a protest (yes, this happened to me…unfortunately more than once). Radical acts of love such as these create fissures in a modern/colonial world that seemingly cannot be destroyed. In a world that tries to convince us to only worry about our individual success while disregarding our complicity in the suffering of others, doing otherwise is without a doubt a revolutionary act. Radical transformation is about building the collective—a world otherwise—in the ruins of colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Decolonial Praxis

It is perhaps unsurprising, given my past and ongoing experiences, that my intellectual and activist work is committed to Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, Black, campesino, and student movements in Latin America and the Caribbean who resist/re-exist to defend their dignity, autonomy, and territories. In no way does this mean I am allowed to speak for these movements. I am merely another student seeking to listen, learn, and modestly contribute. Doing and thinking otherwise (thought & praxis), as mentioned above, is never an end goal but rather an attitude one must actively pursue alongside others.

In this newsletter, I will thus share how decolonial thought and praxis from Latin America and the Caribbean (Abya Yala), as well as from other regions, are geopolitically articulated from below. Terms such as the geopolitics of knowledge and coloniality will be used to reveal their analytical power to interrogate the modern/colonial world. Seriously thinking about the entangled relations of power across geographies will also form part of this newsletter. Since curriculum and pedagogy are of great interest to me and many others, the aim is to create an alternative educational space in which we can collectively learn from decolonial thought and praxis from the Souths of the Global South

---