Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments in US universities, many implicit and explicit vestiges of coloniality remain firmly in place. While certain national and linguistic expressions are privileged, others are silenced with predictable racial and gendered results. Decolonizing American Spanish challenges not only the hegemony of Spain and its colonial pedagogies, but also the characterization of Spanish as a foreign language in the United States. By foregrounding Latin American cultures and local varieties of Spanish and reconceptualizing the foreign as domestic, Jeffrey Herlihy-Meraworks to create new conceptual maps, revise inherited ones, and institutionalize marginalized and silenced voices and their stories. Considering the University of Puerto Rico as a point of context, this book brings attention to how translingual solidarity and education, a commitment to social transformation, and the engagement of student voices in their own languages can reinvent colonized education.

While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our time. The thesis of this book is that there are various ways to decolonize the representation of Amerindian peoples. Each chapter has its own decolonial thesis which it then resolves. Chapter 1 proves that there is coloniality in contemporary scholarship and argues that word choices can be improved to decolonize the way we describe the first Americans. Chapter 2 argues that literature in Latin American begins before 1492 and shows the long arc of Mayan expression, taking the Popol Wuj as a case study. Chapter 3 demonstrates how colonialist discourse is reinforced by a dualist rhetorical ploy of ignorance and arrogance in a Renaissance historical chronicle, Agustin de Zárate's Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú. Chapter 4 shows how by inverting the Renaissance dualist configuration of civilization and barbarian, the Nahua (Aztecs) who were formerly considered barbarian can be "civilized" within Spanish norms. This is done by modeling the categories of civilization discussed at length by the Friar Bartolomé de las Casas as a template that can serve to evaluate Nahua civil society as encapsulated by the historiography of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a possibility that would have been available to Spaniards during that time. Chapter 5 maintains that the colonialities of the pre-Independence era survive, but that Criollo-indigenous dialogue is capable of excavating their roots to extirpate them. By comparing the discussions of the hacienda system by the Peruvian essayist Manuel González Prada and by the Mayan-Quiché eye-witness to history Rigoberta Menchú, this books shows that there is common ground between their viewpoints despite the different genres in which their work appears and despite the different countries and the eight decades that separated them, suggesting a universality to the problem of the hacienda which can be dissected. This book models five different decolonizing methods to extricate from the continuities of coloniality both indigenous writing and the representation of indigenous peoples by learned elites.

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities. This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

International Latino Book Award winner, Best Cookbook More than just a cookbook, Decolonize Your Diet redefines what is meant by "traditional" Mexican food by reaching back through hundreds of years of history to reclaim heritage crops as a source of protection from modern diseases of development. Authors Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel are life partners; when Luz was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, they both radically changed their diets and began seeking out recipes featuring healthy, vegetarian Mexican foods. They promote a diet that is rich in plants indigenous to the Americas (corn, beans, squash, greens, herbs, and seeds), and are passionate about the idea that Latinos in America, specifically Mexicans, need to ditch the fast food and return to their own culture's food roots for both physical health and spiritual fulfillment. This vegetarian cookbook features over 100 colorful, recipes based on Mesoamerican cuisine and also includes contributions from indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, such as Kabocha Squash in Green Pipian, Aguachile de Quinoa, Mesquite Corn Tortillas, Tepary Bean Salad, and Amaranth Chocolate Cake. Steeped in history but very much rooted in the contemporary world, Decolonize Your Diet will introduce readers to the the energizing, healing properties of a plant-based Mexican American diet. Full-color throughout. Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel are professors at California State East Bay and San Francisco State University, respectively. They grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs on their small urban farm. This is their first book.

Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides. Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic façade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the “house slaves,” and those select few people of color who gain access. All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing. With great compassion—because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing—Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.

Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures engages and problematizes concepts such as “decolonial” and “coloniality” to question methodologies in literary and cultural scholarship. While the eleven contributions produce diverse approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from Pre-Columbian to contemporary works, there is a collective questioning of the very idea of “Latin America,” what “Latin American” contains or leaves out, and the various practices and locations constituting Latinamericanism. This transdisciplinary study aims to open an evolving corpus of decolonial scholarship, providing a unique entry point into the literature and material culture produced from precolonial to contemporary times.

'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.

Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies looks for pathways that better connect two often siloed disciplines. This edited collection brings together different disciplinary experiences and perspectives to this objective, weaving together researchers, artists, instructors, and authors who have found ways of bridging Indigenous and Hispanic studies through trans-Indigenous reading methods, intercultural dialogues, and reflections on translation and epistemology. Each chapter brings rich context that bears on some aspect of the Indigenous Americas and its crossroads with Hispanic studies, from Canada to Chile. Such a hemispheric and interdisciplinary approach offers innovative and significant means of challenging the coloniality of Hispanic studies.

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) has been recognized as a central model for the Spanish American 'New Narrative'. Joyce's linguistic and technical influence became the unequivocal sign that literature in Spanish America had definitively abandoned narrow regionalist concerns and entered a global literary canon. In this bold and wide-ranging study, Jose Luis Venegas rethinks this evolutionary conception of literary history by focusing on the connection between cultural specificity and literary innovation. He argues that the intertextual dialogue between James Joyce and prominent authors such as Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mexican Fernando del Paso, reveals the anti-colonial value of modernist form. Venegas explores the historical similarities between Joyce's Ireland during the 1920s and Spanish America between the 1940s and 70s to challenge depoliticized interpretations of modernist aesthetics and propose unsuspected connections between formal experimentation and the cultural transformations demanded by decolonizing societies. Jose Luis Venegas is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

This collection explores the critical decolonial practices of applied linguistics researchers from Latin America and the Latin American diaspora, shedding light on the processes of epistemological decolonization and moving from a monolingual to a multilingual stance. The volume brings together participants from an AILA 2021 symposium, in which researchers reflected on applied linguistics in Latin America, and on the ways in which it brought concerns around social justice, the legacy of coloniality, and the role of monolingual English in education to the fore. Each chapter is composed of four parts: an autobiographical section written both in Spanish or Portuguese and in English followed by a reflection on the epistemological differences between versions; a discussion in English of the research project; a critical reflection on the epistemic practices and critical pedagogies enacted in the project; and the author(s)’ understanding of the concept of decolonization and recommendations for further decolonizing the monolingual mindset of language teachers and learners. At once linguistic, epistemological, and political, the collection aims to diversify the concept of decoloniality itself and showcase other ways in which decolonial thought can be implemented in language education. This book will be of interest to scholars in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education.