by Abril Chimal & José Ramos
Introduction
The history of Latin America can be read as a succession of geopolitical projects and processes of colonization. For more than a century, the region has lived under forms of neocolonial control imposed by the United States: from the Monroe Doctrine to Cold War counterinsurgency, and from there to current forms of financial, technological, and cultural influence, such as structural adjustment programs. The hemisphere has been framed time and again as a space in need of stabilization, protection, or ideological alignment.
Military interventions and economic conditionalities are well documented. Less attention has been paid to how these dynamics operate as “used futures” (Inayatullah, 2008): imaginaries that define what kind of development, democracy, and sovereignty seem possible, along with the binaries that underpin them—North/South, Indigenous/Mestizo, developed/developing, left/right.
This symposium examines the narratives and geopolitical forces that continue to impose pre-determined futures of a neocolonial nature in the Americas. At a time of global power reconfiguration and polarizing political projects, we ask how these worn-out narratives are reactivated and contested, and how to move beyond them. Here, the region is explored as a pluriversal space where territorial, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, popular, and diasporic futures coexist, often in conflict with state-centric models and futures.
We link this geopolitical question that José Ramos (in Fighting for Sacred Futures) and Felipe Bosch (Reimagining Democratic Infrastructure from Latin America) invites us to what we call internal politics: the realm of subjectivity and collective self-image where external domination is normalized, resisted, or transformed. This shift allows us to look beyond external intervention and see how coloniality is reproduced within the region, in the individual and collective entities that inhabit it, through development paradigms, extractivist economies, racial hierarchies, and polarized political imaginaries.
The Future as Infrastructure
Coloniality is not merely told as a narrative of progress or civilization: it is embedded in the tools we use to read, measure, teach, and anticipate the region. The scientific method that demands objectivity to extract data; Karla Paniagua writes on trend reports that translates the global average into a regional outcome; the stakeholder map that reduces the living world to rational actors with fixed interests; Estefania Simon Sasyk, Constanza Díaz del Castillo, Mónica Sahmkow, Dharath Hoonchamlong (in Kitchens That Open to the World) write about the culinary curriculum that inherits Escoffier as a synonym for excellence and the democratic vocabulary imported from the North Atlantic: in each case, the instrument does not merely describe a future that is foreign to us—it enacts it. The question is no longer what future is imposed upon us, but rather what tools and routines we continue to use without realizing that they already embody a colonial perspective.
This is how external geopolitics becomes internal politics, as Abril Chimal and Rodrigo Romer (in Situated Mutant Futures) reflect upon. A structural adjustment program acts from the outside; but the same closure can occur from within—when a culinary school unquestioningly adopts the European canon, when a consulting firm reproduces a global report with local examples but leaves the framework intact, or as Pablo y Lorenza Reyes (in Enactive foresight from the Global South) states that when a planning exercise centered on lithium in the Salar de Atacama divides stakeholders into fixed categories of interest and excludes forms of territorial reciprocity that do not fit within that framework. The empire does not always need to impose itself from the outside: it is enough for the bias of authority to push, because there is no longer a single official future to claim, but rather an architecture of methodological habits that makes certain futures pass for common sense.
The “Other Order”: Listening, Unlearning, Suffering – Internal Politics as a Method
Dominant powers do not merely construct an order: they work to erase the traces that another order was possible. In publishing, this takes the form of censorship of narratives that do not confirm the canon; in curricula, the marginalization of non-European references until they are reduced to folklore; in data and artificial intelligence, the replacement of intimate, handcrafted archives with massive datasets that claim to be neutral while inheriting the hierarchies with which they were trained. What is lost is not just information: it is the possibility of imagining that things could have been different. That is why several contributions in this issue insist that creating alternative futures is not a harmless speculative exercise, but a political and survival-oriented practice as Cesar Santivañez (in Letter to the Editro) advocates through science fiction.
Several works in this symposium converge in a single three-part movement: first, a critique of instrumental rationality that treats nature, the body, the neighborhood, or the family archive as data to be extracted; second, a process of “unlearning” that demands emptying before refilling with Coral Michelin (in an essay to expand Ecosystemic Design with the interconnection between Unlearning, Grief and Utupia), with a real subjective cost for those who undergo it; and third, the recognition that this emptying is not complete without mourning. Mourning appears here in different forms; ecological mourning for wetlands and aquifers irreversibly transformed, domestic mourning over boxes of family photographs from Tatyane Ramos (in Which Archives Shaped Your Imagination?), and bodily mourning for young, racialized, and dissident bodies that violence continues to snatch away on the fringes of large cities with Raziel Sosa Mendienta—but it always upholds the same conviction: no transformation can avoid loss, because mourning exists only where there was love, and that love is what allows us to imagine anew.
In the face of extraction, listening—to wetlands, to frequencies, to photographs, to aquifers understood as living kin—is proposed as a method of knowledge that precedes human imagination and enables coexistence with the more-than-human.
From a Single Canon to Pluriversal Coexistence
The alternative to a single canon is not another single canon—nor one declared “Latin American” without nuance—but rather the coexistence of multiple situated traditions. This issue highlights the region’s own intellectual lineages: the Santiago School and the enactivism of Maturana and Varela (1987) as an epistemological break born in Chile; the prospective tradition of ECLAC/ILPES (Halperin, 2008); Andean and Mesoamerican worldviews; Brazilian Black and Afro-diasporic thought; and Tupí ontologies. Not to replace one hegemony with another, but to show that the Global South was never merely a recipient of others’ futures, but also a producer of its own theory as practice of life. Several contributions also document South-South exchanges—between Venezuela and Thailand, and among Latin American foresight traditions—that seek to escape both North-South dependency and a naïve romanticization of “Global South solidarity” that ignores the real asymmetries between equally peripheral contexts.
Though we might imagine a pluriversal solidarity that transcends lazy binaries, seeking connection and commonality across geographies, a quest for shared survival and dignity across Abya Yala, weaving new acts of commoning, buen vivir, from the very northern Nunangat to the southern Karukinka, and the myriad communities between. Remembering is a cultural practice around the tribal fire, where each member brings their memory and experience into a shared story, recreating a social body, many stories weaving and re-weaving the fabric of the narrative arc using the absurd, as you’ll see in Milagros Fonrouge, Coe Douglas and Mariana Lemes’s piece (in Pataphysics Canibalism) and Helena Rojas’ weaving in communities..
This pluriversalism, also, is not a rhetorical declaration of values: it is a transformation of concrete relational conditions—what questions are asked before designing a curriculum, what sources influence a trend analysis, what horizons govern the negotiation of an aquifer, what images shape a system of visual production, what genres coexist within a single academic text. One of the works in this issue takes this logic to its most radical conclusion: it abandons the conventions of academic writing—citations, glossaries, separate genres—and is written in the oral style of the neighborhood, blending epistle, poetry, and manifesto without any hierarchy among them. A reminder that decolonizing thought cannot stop at content if it does not also intervene in form.
And here we weave stories together
What runs through the works gathered in *Reimagining the Hemisphere* is the same question posed from different angles: Who has the authority to declare what counts as legitimate knowledge, a desirable future, or a living entity, and what situated practices allow us to reopen what that authority closes off? Answering this question requires looking outward—at the doctrines, adjustment programs, and extractive mega-infrastructures that continue to define the hemispheric horizon—and inward, toward domestic politics where those same logics are reproduced, resisted, or transformed in the everyday subjectivity of those who inhabit the region.
The contributions that follow do not resolve this tension nor do they offer a single formula for pluriversal futures. They propose a set of concrete practices—listening, unlearning, grieving, imagining, reconfiguring relational conditions, writing differently—which, together, outline less a program than a shared disposition: to treat the future not as an external horizon to be navigated, but as a relational achievement to be cultivated, here and now, in the Americas.
References
Halperín Donghi, T. (2008). ECLAC in its historical setting. CEPAL Review, 94, 7–26. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1), 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680810855991
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala Publications
