Higher Education in the Améfrica Ladina: Indigenous, Mestizo, and Black Futurisms (Brazil and Mexico)

• In Event: Echoes Across Place and Space: Blackness, Diasporic Violence, and the University: Exploring the Black Experience in the University From an African Diasporic View and Connection

Abstract

Dominant education systems in operation today are, without exception, the result of centuries of annihilating cosmo-interactions (distinct ways of learning intersectionality in multiple spaces and time) and creating a global culture detached from nature, thus forcing Afro and Indigenous peoples worldwide to follow cosmo-phobic ways of existence – imaginary illness perpetuated by the colonizers regarding the fear of the relationship with the nature (dos Santos, 2015; 2018a). Due to this, marginalized groups worldwide use counter-colonial approaches in different spectrums to disrupt policies that deny them access to and permanence in higher education, transforming educational system structures. This work focuses in the Améfrica Ladina – a term coined by the Afro Brasilian activist Lélia Gonzalez to describe the protagonism of Black, Indigenous, and Mestizo populations in the historical materialism of Latin America. Through a comparative lens, this work navigates through the main historical activist initiatives un/organized from 1970s to 2020 to understand the impacts of revolutionary acts toward affirmative actions aiming at expanding access to higher education for marginalized racial communities in Brazil and Mexico.

Author

• Washington Galvao, University of Minnesota