The purpose of the present investigation is to critically examine decolonial feminisms’ epistemologies and practices in order to open up the debate on decoloniality and gender in the South of the world, in particular focusing on the Latin American context. Employing an analysis of the historical developments of white hegemonic feminism, the article offers a reflection on its failure to universalize women’s struggles, presenting a discursive examination of the primary critiques generated in the Souths of the world, including the Souths of the North. Decolonial feminisms are, thus, investigated as a form of theoretical and praxical response to the aforementioned critiques, generated in relation to the discursive and actual perpetuation of the material and symbolic legacies of colonialism. It is here argued that decolonial feminisms employ this alternative perspective as a de facto standpoint, by rooting their principles in anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist narratives, and with some strong established goals, such as social and environmental justice, the rights of indigenous people, and the decolonization of knowledge.

Single mothers, social fighters and protagonists of the indigenous student movement in the struggle for community education in the Normal Experimental School of Cempoaltepelt have organized themselves in the lost decade in Latin America. The experience of the Ayuujk women spans different political actions as organic intellectual. It is crucial for the formation of indigenous autonomy in Santa María Tlahutoltepec, Mixe (Oaxaca, Mexico). Therefore, the professionalization of the leadership of indigenous women in the international arena needs rethinking in a diachronic perspective. The significance that “punishment” has for them, as a “ritual of initiation” in the attempt to access spaces of community participation in the system of charges, leading to becoming the subject of human rights, allows us to rethink the meaning acquired by female leaders in indigenous communities in four historical blocs: crisis of institutional indigenism, penetration of the State, struggle for community education and experiences of political actors as leaders. In short, before 1995, the Ayuujk women’s movement within the Oaxaca indigenous movement has revealed the reconfiguration of the nation-state and its shift to the neoliberal Pluricultural State.

Mike Gonzalez, professeur a l’Universite de Glasgow nous propose une histoire intellectuelle de Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930), ce dernier etant considere comme le marxiste le plus original d’Amerique latine. Alors que cet ouvrage s’adresse principalement a un public anglophone, sa publication marque un interet special pour le monde latino-americain. Ainsi, l’auteur signale que la « resurrection de Mariategui » est liee non seulement a la celebration de son centenaire (1994), mais aussi ...

Based on the analysis of autobiographic stories told by Peruvian domestic workers in Lima, the present article discusses the conditions for these women to stand up and speak out for their rights. Studying the speakers' use of the two verba dicendi (“verbs of speaking”) decir and hablar, it reconstructs the communicative competence these marginalised actors themselves define as necessary for their active participation in society. The analysis allows for discussing the conditions for women in Latin America to participate in the struggle against social inequalities, as well as the role and responsibility of the ethnographic research process with regard to this competence.

Unlike other studies of ‘distance maternity’ in transnational families, this article will examine the situation of mothers who stay with their children in the absence of their partners involved in long-distance migration. It seeks to understand how the experience of being a mother is transformed by reviewing various dimensions: models of maternity, practices, representations of self. It focuses on Mexican families living in working class neighbourhoods in order to analyze the impact in urban areas. Based on an ethnographic study carried out in Mexico with indigenous families, the article highlights several factors in the shifting parental roles within the couple and the family: intergenerational conflicts relating to the definition of norms of maternity, involvement of individuals in ethnic social relationships, geographic dispersal of the family and diversity of characteristic areas of socialization in the city.

This brief statement has two objectives: a) we propose some topics for reflection on the relations between the Latin American left and the so-called "indigenous question", b) we present some aspects of the indigenous experience of the Popular Unity government after win Salvador Allende, between the years 1970-1973. We indicate the special importance it acquired this historic moment in the indigenous world. We conclude emphasizing the dramatic contemporary situation of indigenous societies in Chile.

This article introduces a method of semantic decoding of certain dishes cooked as part of the rituals of the Aztecs at the time of Spanish Conquest and of several contemporary Indian groups. Starting from the idea that, in a ritual nothing is unpredictable and everything has a sense, it introduces a reflection about the categories of metaphor and metonymy conceived as two founding mechanisms of the human mind, at the same time distinct and closely linked, which express themselves in a verbal and material manner. Difrasismos, often considered to be linguistic techniques typical of ritual mesoamerican speeches, are considered here to be particular cases of « definition by extension », which forms « metonymical series ». The ritual dishes are analysed as material and eatable difrasismos which first of all represent a metonymical technique, and constitute the basis of metaphors.

In this article, ritual food is analyzed in the context of an annual offering to the vulture, during the “rain petition” ceremony in the Alto Balsas Nahua region, Mexico. Using the “multispecies ethnography” perspective, the author underlines how the relations between human beings and the vulture are connected to food and empathy, and how the bird, as cleaner of the world, is involved in the complex network of relations framed by the basic Nahua concepts of working, feeding and loving. The human-vulture relationship culminates in the annual offering, which concentrates in an impressive ritual those concepts and the paper of the bird in the agricultural cycle from which Nahua people were traditionally dependent.

Based on the author’s long-term fieldwork, this article examines different strategies for interpreting the use of ritual foods in indigenous regions. It argues that ritual uses of food facilitate cultural reproduction and the transmission of local cosmologies. It considers the preparation y distribution of certain foods in agricultural ceremonies, offerings for the dead, and exchange during marriages. Food in ritual contexts appears to be an area for cultural resistance to imposed modernization in Mexico today.

The text describes and analyzes the Totonac people’s rituals where fowl come into play. It is shown the importance of their life cycle for the different culinary uses according to their stages of development, in other words, from the egg to the chicken or rooster. This analysis is based on an organizing principle which is fundamental to the religious life of this group: the tension between fraction and wholeness.