Looking for a Cure

Back then, family time meant watching the same content on a black screen. The zeitgeist of my childhood was to maximize the physical and mental productive potential of bodies to generate as much surplus value as possible. This used to cause a lot of anguish in adults and children, so entertainment leveraged algorithms to appease collective epidemics of anxiety. Our ecological practices and green consciousness—more than actually helping to prevent climate catastrophe—helped to calm shared dread about our climate’s future. We were convinced we were taking steps to palliate the toxic damage of human predatory presence on Earth: consuming organic products; rejecting plastic straws; recycling (as I did with the toilet tubes I wanted to make something creative from—although my mom very much preferred to get rid of them instead); buying “sweatshop-free” clothing; donating PET bottles to rebuild homes after the 2017 Morelos and subsequent earthquakes; biking rather than driving; signing petitions to rescue animals in endangered natural areas. In sum, we had put a series of measures into place that made us feel like we were doing something, including by being very well informed. In these and other subtler ways, an invisible apparatus of control subjected the population (voluntarily) to a grid of information distribution modelled after human brains, which was, in turn, manipulated by algorithms designed to accumulate value.

One summer, back when we used to recycle, ride our bikes, hear birds chirping when we woke up, post photos on Instagram and make TikTok choreographies, and watch hummingbirds visit the pots of colourful flowers on the patio, I was sent to Canada to Forest School. The place was a Mississauga Anishinabeg reserve belonging to Alderville First Nation in Southern Ontario. On the southern shore of Lake Ontario, 323 people lived in 1,200 acres, and maintained 100 acres on nearby Sugar Island. The community had been displaced a century back from the Bay of Quinte, their original territory, by the English. Agreements with the Canadian government guaranteed them some rights, the two fragmented grounds, and protection of their customs and traditions. They spoke about “resurgence,” “cosmogony,” and “recovery.” They had a huge solar-energy farm, and my favourite activity was the drumming class. I also have beautiful memories about the turtle nursery, a project to reconstruct endemic biomass along the shores of the lake and invite turtles back to nest. The community planted thousands of native flowers to restore the earth and attract pollinators, which I learned included not only bees but also wasps, butterflies, and flies. My Ojibwe friends, teachers, and hosts lived in log houses: long, single-room structures that housed from one to three families. Each of the ten Forest School guests were hosted by a family in one of those wonderful homes. But do not get me wrong! The Ojibwe also had modern houses with all the usual comforts. But back then, in the era of resurgence, they were working to recover their traditional lifeways and we were there to learn from them. My mom wanted me to learn how the Ojibwe sustained their lives collectively and cultivated ways of living together, grounded on a cosmogony transmitted from the Elders that honoured their ancestors and all beings on Earth.

The Ojibwe believed that the Creator of all things had flooded the Earth because its inhabitants were permanently at war. Only Nanaboozhoo and the animals survived the destruction (which, in retrospect, began to look like the destruction that had been extending all over the world and that we then called “the climate crisis”). From the flooded depths, they gathered soil for a new land: Turtle Island, the originary place of the Ojibwe.11This story is told in many contexts by Indigenous Peoples, including, for instance, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arp Books, 2011).I always thought that the community of Alderville was a little bit like Turtle Island: a space to rebuild, recuperate, to be born again. I was lucky enough to go three summers in a row to see my friends. After that—in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—transportation got too expensive. My mom was a writer and her job enabled us to live well, without luxuries. She was a member of a government system of cultural producers that paid for her research and writing for three years at a time. But the scholarships suddenly disappeared. Flying (and transportation in general) became impossible to afford, and so did food, clothing—everything—as fuel prices skyrocketed. A group of conscious people began a movement where they refused to travel long distances, consuming great amounts of fossil fuel. A famous Swedish activist had been crossing the Atlantic by boat for years, and Europe by train. Flying came to an end for most of Earth’s inhabitants, and we went back to my great-grandparents’ times, in which only very few people could afford commercial flights.

In those days, I would hear adults talking about a new president who made some people very angry and others hopeful that all the chaos, toxicity, and vacuity we lived in would be finally transformed into true collective happiness, prosperity, and peace. My friend Sergio would say he was “only the new foreman” of the country, and, for many, the Tlatoani’s rejection of the signs of power and his criticisms of corruption were mere populist eccentricities that further entrenched his power. I heard fragments of conversations in which adults were outraged by extreme violence against women, corrupt politicians who got away with rape and theft, and children who walked into their schools with guns to kill teachers and peers. My school had surveillance cameras everywhere, and this made me very angry, because it thought that adults were actually extremely afraid of children. And, generally, it’s the other way around.

When I compare the past and present, I realize my childhood landscapes seemed all the same, like the content in children’s series from digital-streaming platforms that had killed television and reinvented time. On weekends, I had permission to watch some film or other for no more than two hours. The shows were pretty much all the same, as were the flavours of the candy I ate, the colours of my toys, the music notes and lyrics from the radio we listened to during the long commutes in intense traffic across the city. My friends’ parties took place in special hired venues filled with machines and other kinds of devices that ensured children would be safe and have fun. To be entertained (and happy) was our obligation. There was no room for boredom (for “poetry to emerge,” as my mom would say), to be curious to observe adults’ ways. There was also no time to lie on our stomachs to observe the life within a crack on the ground: better to bug-spray it, just in case.

Once, I remember my mom suggested we catch the rabbit inhabiting the bushes in the middle of the yard of our cottage in the countryside. She’d made a cage for us out of a cardboard box leaning on a stick tied to a string. We were supposed to pull the string when the rabbit came out to collect the gift waiting for her inside the box: a softened carrot. We sat for hours on chairs a good distance away from the cage—enough to not scare the rabbit away, but close enough to see and pull the string at the right moment. That day, Carlitos (the son of our house’s caretakers) spent some time with us. He had a nasty blister on his hand, which he had gotten, he told us, for being willing to play with those who give orders. I thought he had gotten it holding the rope from which a wheel hung, where Luca had been swinging for a while. I didn’t yet understand the dynamic between the “outside” and the “homegrown” kids, but Carlitos did for sure.

Back then, there were not many noticeable differences between living in the country and living in the city. Perhaps rural areas were less dense, the internet speed was maybe not as good, there were fewer things to buy, and, well, the country didn’t look like the city. But actual life was very similar. People sought salaries for working-class jobs that could be done anywhere (plumber, carpenter, property caretaker, butler, gardener, cook, cleaner). They would buy their food in supermarkets or mobile markets that offered goods also sold in cities. And even though there were no movie theatres, the pirate DVD market kept rural populations up to date on Hollywood and Disney productions. I remember that my country friends were not that different from me: we had pop culture references, toys, games, dreams—many things—in common. My family began spending longer periods of time at the country house. First, because of the successive lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic; then, because the water shortages in the city led to chaos everywhere, and to school and office closures. Next, the city became unlivable. Water shortages and skyrocketing fuel and food prices made life in the city even more precarious and dangerous than it had been before. So we moved permanently to the countryside.

There was a massive migration of city dwellers to rural areas. I remember the long rainy days when we took cover under our raincoats to run through the dense forest, playing hide-and-seek, or picking berries in our labyrinth and turning the sugary, fruity mixture in a gigantic clay pot for hours with a wooden spoon. Sometimes we would go for long bike or horse rides. People were still able to afford food for leisure animals, but with the drought, leisure horses began to disappear—most of the time, to appease human hunger. By the time I graduated from online high school, horses, cats, and dogs were gone. Our dogs and horse died natural deaths, I have to mention; we never replaced them.

Around the time we moved to the countryside, Carlitos’s father and five other men from the village disappeared. Mutilated bodies of women from adjacent towns had also begun to appear in the forest. It seemed that the murders had no purpose other than generating terror among people who refused to leave their homes. They knew that forced disappearance and terror had led elsewhere in the country to land dispossession. But everyone stayed, despite being terrified, and even though they had sold large portions of their cornfields to foreigners like us, who had transformed them into luxury leisure gardens for foreigners; but no one knew how to work the cornfields anyways. In 1915, the Agrarian Reform had redistributed land to the community of forty families who had established themselves there. A small hacienda in ruins and an obsolete hydroelectric plant were reminders of that era. Decades later, the communal lands had been fragmented and sold to foreigners, who had acquired the land to spend weekends and vacations on. For years, abandoned gigantic trash bags had been the mark of the weekend visitors. Aside from the originaries and the foreigners, some thirty families had come to live on the land alongside the highway, because they had been displaced from their original lands a few hundred metres away. Representatives had convinced them to sell their properties, and a real estate development company bought them off for very cheap. By the time we moved to the village, the real estate company had developed a massive sustainable luxury complex, and while it had a state-of-the-art water-collection system, it had still also hijacked the whole community’s main water source. This situation generated a lot of tension, partly because of land disputes among families, the newcomers (us and other foreigners and our displaced neighbours), the lack of water, food, and work, and the constant outages of electricity and communications infrastructure. Yet, many of our neighbours worked as cleaners, gardeners, and nannies, or doing maintenance jobs for the inhabitants of the luxury complex.

One day, at the magic hour when the sun is gone but there is still light, a hoard of tlacuaches (Mexican possums) began to unhook from the branches of the oyamel trees surrounding the village; then, a cloud of monarch butterflies flew through like quickly dissipating smoke. When the light was gone, fireflies arrived in a massive flock, illuminating the tlacuaches’ dramatic collective death in the main square. It seemed like the butterflies and fireflies’ passage had been a kind of a farewell to the possums. But almost nobody saw these events, because it was a holiday and the tlacuaches’ screams had been choked by the sounds of the firecrackers exploding well into the early hours of the next morning. By midday, the inhabitants found the bodies of dozens of tlacuaches lying in the main square. They discovered that they had died of toxic levels of lutein, the substance mixed into chicken feed to produce eggs with bright yellow yolks. The villagers had sold a small collective for egg production to the municipality and adjacent towns. While their chickens had become optimized machines, the chemicals used to “better” their food had intoxicated the tlacuaches.

These scenes—the tlacuaches’ bodies sprawled in the main square, the violent loss of family members, water scarcity, electricity problems, the lack of money and work, and tensions between the foreigners or those who command, also known as patrones or “reason people,” and the villagers—prompted the villagers to begin to autonomously organize. Before, the politicians had instated laws favouring reason people over the interests of originary inhabitants. Including turning a blind eye to the water source theft perpetrated by the luxury complex. But after the villagers organized—rejecting the government’s structures—us foreigners had to legally cede our properties to the originary inhabitants in order to be able to permanently live in our country homes. This meant we gave up the right to demand that the law act on our behalf. Then, we had to establish a rental and barter scheme. In our case, we gave up legal possession of the house and transformed the garden into arable land, in exchange for being able to live there. All the foreigners and older inhabitants came to realize that we were interdependent, and that mutual survival was at stake.

Why were we allowed to stay after the villagers declared autonomy? Sometimes I thought we were incredibly lucky. Maybe they felt protected by our presence. Or maybe it was because we brought technology and know-how of the modern world, like solar panels, money, sophisticated water-collection systems, and the internet. We also knew how to build greenhouses and where to buy the best and cheapest materials. They shared their land and knowledge of working the soil. We were aware of our privileged situation, our shaky intercultural relations, and how much work needed to be done to undo centuries of damage and trauma from hubris, prejudice, racism, and the caste system.

Adults began holding collective assemblies to make agreements in everyone’s best interests. There were weekly meetings to discuss community tensions that felt like group therapy. An assembly met twice a week to work through colonial and mestizaje trauma. In a third group, originary people could confront the foreigners with their qualms and anger. A mediator from a neighbouring town came to help in dealing with the tensions. We were all aware this work was being done for the common good. The very first intercultural assembly was carried out to decide how to best implement an independent network of satellite communications. After winning a legal battle against business magnate Carlos Slim and his communications monopoly, Telcel (which provided mediocre coverage for the village), we hired Communitarian Indigenous Telecommunications (TIC-AC)—who implemented highly functional cell phone networks in the area. The second task of the assembly was making collective decisions to establish a medium-term plan to build infrastructure to capture, filter, and store rainwater.

Around that time, a group of First Nations activists from the north had come to Mexico to offer workshops on reckoning with colonial racist stigmas and traumas to build a road to recovery and resurgence. The villagers requested a weekly workshop in the community centre, and began a process of self-construction through the revitalization of their Matlatzinca and Nahua roots. With my friends from the village, I practised and exchanged some of the knowledges I had learned at Forest School in Canada: how to make small knives, how to observe the weather to make predictions, and how to heal small wounds with plasters made of plants that I grew in a small parcel of the garden behind the kitchen window. I also took an interest in figuring out ways to restore endemic biomass in the area, and so I joined the community’s delegation to begin reforesting, following the First Nation Elders’ wisdom: “Trees are good because they are simultaneously networked into the sky, the dirt and the breath. They feel everything and they record it in their tree bones.”22Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 65.

The belief that reason people’s fossil fuel addiction was the root of the spiral of self-destruction and destruction of the world had become ubiquitous. It had also become common knowledge that autonomous ways were the solution. Territories in secession from the nation-corporate-state (like ours) began to proliferate, even within militarized, hyper-surveilled, and automatized urban areas. To establish security from the threats of the militarized state and as an autonomous zone, a territory had to first become a “safe zone” by buying self-defence equipment. In the process, autonomous zones wrestled, to varying degrees, with their own increasing militarization and the political necessity of violence. The most popular equipment was sold by the Israeli company Zahal. In other cases, communities had been transformed into autonomous zones through struggles for territorial defence. They were called ZADs: zones à defendre, or zones to defend. For example, the Atenco ZAD was constituted through an action against corporate and government appropriation of the land to build a new airport for Mexico City. The inhabitants of Atenco won the fight, recycled the infrastructure for the airport that had already been built (some 70 percent of it) and transformed it into greenhouses and water reservoirs, and then claimed secession. They not only seceded from the state but also rejected invasive technology and automatization along with corporate presence, including fibre-optic, satellite, and electricity networks. They began to use radio waves to communicate, inspiring many other communities throughout the shrinking Mexican nation.

Every day, our community dealt with the legacy of colonization, with long-standing tensions surrounding the former status of reason people and bosses, and for the rest, contending with the traumas inflicted by a school system that did not recognize their cultures, languages, knowledges, histories, and life experiences. For many generations, their traditional ways of life had been criminalized and deemed inferior. Yet, inspired by Indigenous resurgence and Oaxacan communality, we discussed ways to transform our predator links to the land and to cultivate relationships based on respect, non-interference, self-determination, and freedom. We came to consider nature not as a “resource” but as a gift we have an obligation to reciprocate. We were determined to build a future that rejected heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and capitalist violence through a collective process of decolonization, finding ways to deeply reorganize life. I will not get into how the community splintered due to contradictions, resentments, miscommunications, and a general lack of trust. I think focusing on what we did achieve is more important.

By the time I was eighteen, autonomous communities defended by community vigilantes had become a major form of self-governance across the world. The largest militarized zones back then were Gilead and the Islamic Republic. Both were anti-consumerist theocracies and militarized economies focused on solving the population’s fertility problems. They were definitely not places where I would have considered living. There were also smaller militarized zones dispersed across semi-autonomous territories in old cities across the world, still identifying with the nation state schema. Walled in, they coexisted with the autonomous, or rebellion, zones, united in a confederation linked by secession from the nation states that had once overseen their territories. Aside from rejecting corporate forms of technology and the state, autonomous zones banned productive work and cultivated belonging and interdependence through collective and reproductive work. Three pioneering autonomous zones remain the leading examples for many others: transgender, drug-user, and orphan communities that established themselves in an abandoned cemetery on Delhi’s periphery at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In India, transgender and intersex people were traditionally known as hijras, and many made a living as sex workers. As a community, they represented the redundant population (those excluded from the consumption and production cycles of the old pre-ZAD capitalist system), seen as the excess of India’s neoliberal nationalist project. Similar to parachuteros and barzonistas in Mexico City, they occupied the cemetery’s grounds on the outskirts of Delhi and created a care and mutual aid structure, like an extended, multigenerational family. They slept in improvised tents among the tombs, planted vegetables, and re-envisioned human family beyond the division between the living and the dead. Theirs was an exemplary paradise of the vulnerable with the capacity to recover and survive, together. Three other communities that inspired the autonomous zones were the liberated refugee camp in Calais, in northern France; the Tornillo refuge home for migrant children in western Texas, some seventeen kilometres away from El Paso at the Mexican-American border; and the Canal Bordo community in Tijuana. In the two first, NGOs and corporations like IKEA donated tents for migrants stuck in transit. Eventually, they declared themselves ZADs and began to self-govern and to establish stable mutual aid and sustenance microeconomies. But, in truth, it all began in Acapulco.

Our lives and societies around the world have been transformed by technology. We have trusted big tech and celebrated the internet as an ungoverned space with unlimited emancipatory potential. But the collapse of reality under surveillance capitalism and the monetization of our personal data is not an accident: it was always a long-term objective of technology companies. We are living in a scenario imagined by the dystopian TV series Black Mirror: a narcissistic reflection, addressing a self that has been dissociated and dislocated from its reflection in an opaque mirror—a mirror that obliterates not only the alterity of the image but also the existence of the other, of alterity itself.

The internet, moreover, has become as a complex propaganda apparatus to which content is irrelevant. The capitalist capture of information is not about policing content but about keeping information circulating. We don’t know yet the full extent of the manipulation of Facebook, Google, and Amazon in the last two US elections. But we do know that digital platforms are executing censorship. For instance, Zoom cancelled a meeting on its platform hosting an event involving Palestinian human rights activist Leila Khaled last October, and a month before, Facebook and Twitter censored information detrimental to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. The same companies intervened last year when they shut down pro-Trump accounts, including Donald Trump’s own accounts. What is at issue here is not whether digital platforms are partisan actors, but rather the fact that their immense power goes unchecked. They have reshaped human civilization under the cybernetic episteme, which is one of the elements making us oblivious to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

The “cybernetic episteme” describes how our relationship to technology and machines (which are inseparable from capitalism) gives shape to how we understand the world.33According to its Greek etymology, “episteme” is a system of understanding. In The Order of Things, philosopher Michel Foucault takes up the term “épistémè” to mean the historical, non-temporal, a priori knowledge that grounds truth and discourses. Several épistémès coexist at a given time as the parts of various power-knowledge systems. Cybernetics results from the modern episteme of knowledge production, which views the world through scientific and mathematical models: as calculable, measurable, extractable, exploitable. The digitalization of everything is grounded in the belief that it is possible to formalize all knowledge, to transform everything into data. In other words, cybernetics means the subsumption of social worlds into the digital through techniques of statistical forecasting and data modelling.

The cybernetic episteme also stems from a Eurocentric world view, which began with the so-called discovery of the New World and the creation of empires and colonies, which is inextricable from the scientific revolution. In this sense, cybernetics is inseparable from the Western civilizing project for the whole world, which connected the world through technologies like the telegraph, steam shipping, and fossil fuels and has culminated in globalization as the deregulation and financialization of the world economies.44Dipesh Chakrabarty, “World-Making, ‘Mass’ Poverty, and the Problem of Scale,” e-flux journal, no. 114 (December 2020): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/366191/world-making-mass-poverty-and-the-problem-of-scale/. The Western civilizing project (based on Enlightenment values: equality, peaceful public life, access to modern science, the rule of law, democracy, technology, and progress) came with the creation of infrastructure to unify nations and the world,55Chakrabarty, “World-Making, ‘Mass’ Poverty, and the Problem of Scale.” or what is known as the “technosphere,” comprising the digital world, machines, factories, computers, cars, buildings, railways, and the technologies we use to produce food, extract material resources, and convert and distribute energy—increasingly, all the tools that keep us alive. In the present, the infrastructure of our world—the technosphere—is fused with information. The world we inhabit is designed by data.

The technosphere is not insignificant or abstract. Its mass amounts to fifty kilograms for every square metre on Earth’s surface: a total of 30 trillion tons that coexist with the diminishing hydrosphere (water, cryosphere, frozen polar regions) and the biosphere (all of Earth’s living organisms).66Nikos Katsikis, “Operational Landscapes and the Planetary Thünen Town,” Technosphere Magazine, May 29, 2019, https://technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/Operational-Landscapes-and-the-Planetary-Thunen-Town-wEHRDNXmerHhSqB7jYXGuC.The cost of the technosphere is the denial of life cycles (thinking of death and illness as aberrations to be suppressed), climate change, environmental devastation, and the decimation of the biosphere and hydrosphere. Like humans, the technosphere needs external energy input, which is not sustainable as long as it comes from fossil fuels that will eventually deplete. Our environment now, including nature, has been constructed by humans, and large parts of it are social and technological artifacts—including climate change. An invisible infrastructure dominates—an infrastructure that always remains partially occult: we are alienated from it just as we are produced and managed by it.

A model for human existence that sees the brain as the site of all consciousness is bound up with the cybernetic episteme and regimes of datafication. This model is based on the mind/body and nature/culture splits, which produce dangerous, reductive, and obsolete oppositions between humans and their environment. We have more recently confirmed that the gut is also a locus of human bodily intelligence, as its mission is to facilitate our capacity to adapt to our environment. The cranial and computational paradigm based on centring intelligence in the brain implies that human intelligence processes statistical structures. However, according to art historian Caroline Jones, this is a limited way of relating to the Earth based on the fetishism of representation.77Caroline Jones, “Questioning the Cranial Paradigm,” Edge, June 19, 2019, https://www.edge.org/conversation/caroline_a_jones-questioning-the-cranial-paradigm.

The gut-immune-brain axis works in a much more sophisticated way: mobilizing memory, adaptation, and an understanding of our environments based on visceral sensation. This non-consciousness related to the gut-immune-brain is in charge of maintaining homeostasis, optimizing the organism’s operating systems, and navigating the environment. Clearly, the body is part of and exists in symbiosis with its surroundings: not through a bracketing or reduction of it (as the Western phenomenological model of perception suggests). Human environments may not, after all, be the product of a representative structure but, instead, the outcome of a symbiosis between humans and planetary systems that gives shape to our consciousness and enables us to learn, navigate, and remember. Jones thus proposes that this non-cerebral consciousness grounded in the gut means that the mind is distributed throughout our bodies. For instance, autoimmune illnesses due to the presence of toxic substances in our environment (pollutants, chemicals, pesticides, biocides, industrialized foods, medicines) are mutations or adaptations of our bodies to our surroundings. Insofar as we conceive of technology as an extension of our cognitive apparatus—as a prosthetic—we leave out everything else. What is at stake—in our structures of thinking, and therefore of technology—is our capacity to adapt to an environment in upheaval due to climate change: a job done by the gut, not by the brain.

Wars under the conditions of globalization are terrorizing practices exercised against populations living under military occupation by corporate states, which govern through necropower and necropolitics. The 2014 disappearance of forty-three student teachers from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico demonstrates clearly how corporate states have become nothing other than death-distribution machines. They are unstoppable, even though populist power has recognized that, as just one example of many such devastating events, “Ayotzinapa is a thorn [of state violence] nailed to our souls.”88As stated by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a press conference in the state of Guerrero on February 25, 2021. For more, see (in Spanish): Roberto Garduño, “Ayotzinapa, una espina en el corazón de los mexicanos, dice AMLO en Iguala,” La Jornada, February 24, 2021, https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/02/24/politica/ayotzinapa-una-espina-en-el-corazon-de-los-mexicanos-dice-amlo-en-iguala//. It is not populist rhetoric but rather collectives of civilians searching for disappeared relatives who have been fighting against the machines that distribute death and authoritarianism. The state has been incapable of naming forced massive disappearance, and the necromachines refuse to back off.

How is it possible that we came to live in a world that globally accepts a system that thrives on destruction and death? For many, the present emerges from the European “world-making” of the sixteenth century: colonization and imperialism amid a scientific revolution that stoked Europeans’ fervour to “civilize” the world by imposing first their religion and language (as in Latin America), and then their science and culture. The European world view was also achieved by exporting the political technology of the nation state and by connecting nations through technologies like the telegraph, steam power, fossil fuels,—precursors to market globalization and economic deregulation. Yet, the European promise of modernity has not been fulfilled for everyone. The romance of progress has obscured dispossession, environmental destruction, and mass alienation. Political theorist Achille Mbembe asks how anti-colonial leaders bought this vision of the modern world: How did Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru agree to this? According to Mbembe, it was because they fell in love not with the material aspects of modernization but with the Enlightenment values of equality, universality, and public peace. Anti-colonial thinkers, therefore, spoke in good faith about ending poverty through modern development.99Chakrabarty, “World-Making, ‘Mass’ Poverty, and the Problem of Scale.”

In continuity and solidarity with anti-colonial thinkers, liberals have put discussions of restitution, recognition, inclusion, and decolonization on the table, with the desire to build a new order that is more plural and equitable. Yet this is clearly impossible without systemic change. We are all born with differently pigmented skin, yet “race” remains a cultural construction that impacts human beings differentially, establishing the place everyone occupies in the world, variously distributing privileges and degrees of access to modern lifestyles and inscribing vulnerability. We live in a stratified global caste system, divided into privileged and redundant populations. The first inhabit modern enclaves with access to education, health care, jobs, and entertainment; the second live in sacrifice zones, where the colonial relations at a global scale materialize through devastation and death. While “difference” is sought out and celebrated in the global culture industries and Hollywood, liberalism will remain unable to reproduce a formless and kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of differences unless colonial socioeconomic structures are upended. As Mixe writer Yásnaya E. Gil has argued, the identification of liberals with movements supporting the rights and claims of Indigenous Peoples casts both light and shadow. In her immense generosity, Gil grants that non-Indigenous people have established healthy and respectful relationships with Indigenous cultures across Mexico, supporting their struggles, learning their languages, and becoming immersed in their cultures. At the same time, the recognition of originary languages and cultures, for Gil, hides a deep reality: ongoing prejudice that has transformed originary cultures into “folklore” and thus a consumer product perpetuating the “good savage” myth, simplifying and appropriating their lifeways and idealizing or caricaturizing their cultures. It also produces an obsession with erasing difference.1010Yásnaya E. Aguilar Gil, “De chairos, izquierdas e indígenas,” in Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística, ed. Ana Aguilar Guevara et al. (Mexico City: Almadía, 2020), 97. In spite of liberal good intentions, the colonial blind spot of modernity continues structuring hierarchies and creating institutions that normalize and harvest forms of pedagogy, which get implanted in bodies with repressive force. According to Bolivian Aymara feminist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the Mestizo is incapable of producing citizenships of difference because their subjectivity is constituted by fissures of self-negation and parody. In other words, modernity is the demand to repress and expel the “Indian” within. This expulsion is still the dream of the Latin American elites, understood as progress1111Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un undo ch’ixi es posible: Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019), 36, 38.—a myth of a colourless society where the neutrality and secularity of state universalism grants citizenship for everyone, even in spite of differences. The question is whether to struggle to insert originary populations (insofar as their status is that of subalterns) within the circuits of citizenship or to instead get rid of the nation state.

Early in May 2021, in a ceremony in the Maya city of Felipe Carrillo Puerto in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador apologized for the five centuries of discrimination and abuse committed against Maya peoples by national authorities and foreigners during the Spanish conquest, comprising the three centuries of colonial domination and the two centuries of an independent Mexico. A hundred metres away, a contained protest was taking place against the Mayan Train, a megaproject of death that will displace numerous Maya communities and radically change their lifeways and livelihoods.1212Roberto Garduño and Néstor Jiménez, “Estado mexicano ofrece disculpas a mayas por cinco siglos de oprobios,” La Jornada, May 4, 2021, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2021/05/04/politica/005n1pol. So while there is official and overt recognition of dispossession and injury to originary populations, damage nevertheless persists in the name of modernization and progress,1313Angela Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Nikita Dhawan, “Planetary Utopias,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 5 (Autumn 2019): https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/planetary-utopias. with the government offering citizenship to Indigenous people by connecting their lands to global markets through extractivists projects and exploiting them as cheap labour.

At the same time, elites want to forget the past that involves them as the dominant pole of a colonial axis. A true mirror reflection of this forgetting is the current nationalist narrative in which all Mexicans (including descendants of Europeans and Mestizos) now identify with the splendour of the pre-Hispanic past. Claiming to be the descendants of cultures like the Aztecs or the Toltecs, they appropriate the spectral remains of the pre-Hispanic past through clothing, ceremonies, and folklore. Thus, in the current Mexican historical imaginary, all Mexican citizens are the victims of Spanish colonization. This narrative is perpetuated through government policies such as the creation of the diplomatic posts of the “consuls of memory” and through the academic attachés in Mexican embassies in charge of documenting damages perpetuated upon Mexico by the Vatican and the European aristocracy during the Spanish Empire.

This narrative has likewise been adopted into mainstream “liberal” culture. In a scene from Palestinian filmmaker Elias Suleiman’s Happy End (2019), we see settler Mexican actor Gael García Bernal stating his grievances against the 500-year-old conquest of Mexico, which continues through Hollywood’s imperial conquest. García Bernal declares in the film, “by seeking to produce a film about the conquest in English, and starring a Spanish actor, Benicio del Toro.” In the narrative, García Bernal appropriates the status of the colonized person, and this is how he demonstrates allyship with Suleiman, and thus with the Palestinian cause. Suleiman’s film is about hubris as a naturalized way of relating to others in everyday life, and everywhere: in his Nazareth neighbourhood and a restaurant there; in France trying to find a chair by the Tuileries Garden fountain; and in the display of power by a military parade crossing the streets of Paris. García Bernal’s appearance (which occurs when Suleiman is visiting a producer in New York who has agreed to make his film) is symptomatic of the colonial blind spot that has enabled descendants of Europeans in former colonies to claim the status of the oppressed. The same goes for the academic term “Global South,” which erases the fact that, for the most part, academics and cultural producers living in the former Third World actually live privileged lives, as precarious as the lives of our European and North American peers. As urban dwellers, our privileges are sustained by the ongoing dispossession, displacement, and exploitation of originary populations.

Perhaps this is the reason why the universalist or multiculturalist liberal world views have become unsustainable, even delegitimizing. Fragmented worlds and inequality prevail, underscored by the impossibility of drawing a world in common, a shared future. While originary peoples in Mexico and elsewhere have a voice in multicultural forums to discuss racism and linguistic dispossession, a scarcity of solidarity with territorial and resource defence demonstrates the ongoing hubris of settlers. For instance, Gil’s village, San Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla, has been embroiled in a war for water since 2017, ever since a group of armed men from a neighbouring community occupied the lands containing the water source for her region. This water dispute is taking place amid the intensification of extractivism, dispossession of the commons, and a political economy based on selling resources to the global market, with the collateral effect of destroying the environment and the means of human subsistence. In the meantime, across the country there is a hunt for leaders of struggles to defend their territories and women to facilitate extractivist projects. But this is also occurring in the context of the recognition and celebration of a plural Mexico.1414A beautiful book in solidarity with Ayutla’s water struggle is Saúl Hernández Vargas and Juan Pablo Ruiz Núñez, eds., El lugar del agua. Palabras para Ayutla (Oaxaca: Yagular, 2021).   

“Decolonization” for those of us descended from European occupiers should mean “demodernization” or “becoming unmodern.” Consider that the Wiwa people of northern Colombia believe that Westerners are their “little brother”—irresponsible, misguided, mischievous, and ignorant—and that the Wiwa’s task is to protect the Earth until he grows up, hopefully before he destroys it for good.1515As stated by a Wiwa Elder in the first episode of the Colombian TV series El Buen Vivir. The episode is available online: “El Buen Vivir | Capítulo 1: Curar con los espíritus,” YouTube video, 26:01, posted by Canal Trece Colombia, May 11, 2020, https://youtu.be/YpoBz3UTCAM. Clearly incommensurability, not difference, is necessary. We must adopt a critical stance toward tools, concepts, vocabularies, and organizational practices that characterize the landscapes of struggle today, because the instruments we are using to change unjust structures come from them. We must acknowledge that the nation state is submerged in capitalism, and thus will never grant justice, reparation, and citizenship to everyone. This is why activism means not only putting our words, energy, and bodies in solidarity with struggles for territorial defence, but also imagining something alternative to the nation state, which concentrates the majority of wealth in few hands.1616Davis, Spivak, and Dhawan, “Planetary Utopias.” In the medium term, we need to foresee the damaged caused by our current cycles of production and consumption and the futility of the state: there is no social contract in contemporary civil society, only self-elected political entrepreneurs acting in their own interests. When we blame the state, accuse it of being “bad” or “failed,” we are giving up our true powers of organization, mutual aid, and a possible future in common.