Manuel Bayón Jiménez, Delmy Tania Cruz Hernandez

This book is above all a commitment to encounter. Is the research result of a Working Group (Grupo de Trabajo) of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), which brings together people who study and research, but who, above all, carry out collective actions from social organizations to transform the reality of our continent. This character of thinking doing, or rather, of doing thinking, of the Grupo de Trabajo gives this text a peculiar cadence. A cadence that demands a collective and cooperative authorship. It is also a recovery of the struggles that precede us, the sutures of the loom of memory that patriarchal and colonial capitalism strives to pierce, and that is another of the powers of this book. The book invites to dismantle the patriarchal and colonial legacies embedded in the very foundations of hegemonic academic thought, and demonstrates the urgent need to understand this as a political task of the moment. It is organized into three main stations, which, like a train journey, can be travelled through sequentially from beginning to end, or entered randomly, stopping at one or another section according to the interests and concerns of the moment. The volume’s contributors are Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández, Manuel Bayón, Alicia Migliaro González, Ana Lucía Ramazzini, Colectivo Magdalenas Uruguay—Teatro de las oprimidas, Cristina Cucurí, Cristina Vega, Dina Mazariegos García, Elvira Cuadra Lira, Eva Vázquez, Gabriela Ruales, Gabriela Veras Iglesias, Giulia Marchese, InÞigo Arrazola, Ivonne Yánez, Jonatan Rodas, Juliana Díaz Lozano, Lisset Coba, Lorena Rodríguez Lezica, Mariano Féliz, Mauricio Arellano Nucamendi, Melissa Moreano, Miriam García-Torres, Miriam Lang, Rosa H.G. Govela Gutiérrez (†), Rossana Cantieri Cagnone, Sofía Zaragocin, and Walda Barrios-Klee (†). Rosa Govela Gutiérrez and Walda Barrios-Klee died while the book was being edited.

Delmy Tania Cruz, PhD in Social Anthropology from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology and MA in Gender Studies in Quito (Ecuador). Currently collaborates at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Chiapas and the Southern Border at UNAM. She coordinates the working group Bodies, Territories and Feminisms of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). She is a member of Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo and is co-founder of the community-based environmental organization no gubernamental (Women Transforming Worlds) based in Chiapas. In 2021 she coordinated the publication of the book Frontiers and Bodies against the Capital. Feminist and popular insurgencies in Abya Yala. Her papers have been published by, among other outlets, Geo Pautas, Eutopía UNAM, Journal of Latin American Psychosocial Studies, Ecología Política.



Manuel Bayón, PhD(c) (Leipzig University) and MA in Urban Studies (Quito, Ecuador) is the coordinator of Contested Territories Amazonía at FLACSO University in Ecuador. Previously, he worked at CENEDET and Acción Ecológica. He is a member of the Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo and Colectivo de Geografía Crítica del Ecuador. His previous books include La Selva de los Elefantes Blancos, El Yasuní en medio del derrumbe petrolero global y Geografía crítica para detener el despojo de los territorios. His papers have been published in Journals such as Antipode, GeoForum, Ecología Política, Geografía Norte Grande, International Journal of Geo-Information, Journal of Latin American Geography, Environment and Planning D Society and Space, Human Geography.



Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo: We are activists, enthusiastic, energetic people who believe in transformation and the power of thinking about life in common. We were born in different countries of the world (Ecuador, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay) and we have been in Quito for several years now, a place that has become our space of conspiracies. We place ourselves in Latin American and Caribbean feminism as a site of struggle, invention, creation, transformation and thought. Our gazes weave the link between diverse bodies and territories.

We think of the body as our first territory and we recognise territory in our bodies: when the places where we live are violated, our bodies are affected; when our bodies are affected, the places where we live are violated. We vindicate the importance of the sensitive experience, it is our bodies that embody our life, our memory and it is our senses that connect us with the territories. What happens in the territories is imprinted on the body: the sadness of exploitation, the anguish of contamination, the joy of building other worlds despite so much violence. In the face of dispossession, we try to build bridges between feminism, environmentalism, nature and the territories that allow us to look at the world in a more holistic and sensitive way, and above all that this thinking becomes actions that transform our lives. Often, we do this through bodily methodologies, which try to connect experience with reflections, in order to search for collective strategies of resistance.

We are urban, that is the place from where we look at ourselves, think about ourselves, reproduce our lives and from where we want to build bridges with other territories. We start from different conditions and positions, we review our privileges and we also fight against our oppressions. We do not want to speak for "the others" but from our own experiences, thoughts, rebellions and places in order to generate dialogues and understand each other. We are diverse and therefore we recognize and join other struggles. And we learn from them. We ask ourselves how from our urban places we can contribute to the resistance of other spaces and vice versa. We want to understand the power of the connections between the urban and other territories. We consider it important to weave alliances and establish joint strategies to stop the destruction of our territories-bodies, our planet, our Earth. (https://territorioyfeminismos.org/)

"First and foremost a commitment to the encounter … The book reminds us that the current crisis can only be explained by the continuum of racist, patriarchal, and extractivist violence that has prevailed throughout Abya Yala for over five hundred and two years" -- Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo (Ecuador)