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Around the mid-1970s in Latin America raged what the Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama once called the ‘catastrophic era’. Rama described the takeover, in quick succession, of Latin America’s states by brutal Right-wing military dictatorships, many backed by the United States. Amid widespread criminal state violence against peasants, Indigenous people, writers, trade unionists, students and artists, many intellectuals fled. In Argentina, a 1966 military coup had led to heavy intervention in the country’s flourishing universities. Walter Mignolo, originally from a small town in the province of Córdoba, was a literature student at the National University of Córdoba. After graduating, Mignolo left for Paris in 1969, where he received his PhD under the French critic Roland Barthes before going on to teach at the universities of Toulouse, Indiana and Michigan. His landmark book The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) was published when debates prompted by the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival to the New World absorbed the Hispanophone intellectual world. Mignolo asked how to remember, how to historicise, the conquest and the genocide that followed? What was the role of history and writing, and thought itself, in the genocide?
In the late-1990s, a loose, interdisciplinary group of Latin American intellectuals, most of them educated and working in the US, formed the Modernity/Coloniality group. Mignolo – by then at Duke University in North Carolina – led the effort. They hoped to theorise ‘coloniality’ and ‘the coloniality of power’, terms popularised by Mignolo but developed by the Peruvian sociologist and ex-revolutionary Aníbal Quijano, as the counterside to European and ‘Eurocentric’ scholarship on modernity. Mignolo, his students and collaborators – including the Argentine-Brazilian anthropologist Rita Segato, the sociologist Edgardo Lander and the anthropologist Fernando Coronil from Venezuela, the sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel and the philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres from Puerto Rico, the Argentine philosopher María Lugones and the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez – sought to centre the Americas in global history, and demonstrate that ideas like ‘modernity’ and ‘imperialism’ could not be understood – as they largely were then and are now – without accounting for the global impact of the region’s colonisation. They wanted to describe Latin America not with concepts adapted from elsewhere but with its own categories, on its own terms.
The school of thought they shaped became known as decoloniality and the ‘decolonial turn’, one of the most influential and widespread intellectual movements over the past generation. Their work, or a version of it, informed social movements across Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico and elsewhere. Today, Walter Mignolo stands as the preeminent living figure of its most widespread iteration, fortified by originating in the US.
I met Mignolo in 2019 as an overeager college sophomore who had just left behind his home country of Argentina and his dreams of a career in biology for an English major in the US. Advised that Mignolo was a giant of Latin American scholarship, I attended a talk he gave at Slought art gallery in Philadelphia. I took rapt (now impenetrable) notes as he unfurled an elaborate theoretical system, spelling out the ‘coloniality of power’ and the brutal operations through which it secured power over mind and matter alike. His system, he clarified, supplanted Marxism or any other ‘Western’ or ‘Eurocentric’ philosophy, promising a total explanation of the construction of reality, difference, hierarchy and more from a Latin American perspective. The system had extraordinary ambition but was also simplistic, rife with an abstraction that troubled me. There was little discussion of economics or material reality, of historical change or social theory. What preoccupied Mignolo was representation, images, the construction of knowledge – fair enough for a critic, but not for someone trying to unseat Karl Marx. During the Q&A, a woman who identified as an Indigenous activist from Peru asked him what was to be done – this whole system of oppression he laid out was great, but how might we topple it? Mignolo answered: ‘epistemic delinking’, teaching people to think differently, especially the young. The activist’s question was, I thought, transparently unimportant to him, and she had to repeat it multiple times before he understood.
Last year, I interviewed Mignolo via email, and I remembered the anecdote. I recalled his dazzling erudition and outsized ambition and his bourgeois, exilic detachment from the question. To read Mignolo, the school of thought he founded and the thinkers he promoted – Quijano and the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, most notably – is to see how some of the Latin American Left has thought in the aftermath of dictatorships. Latin America has an incomparable revolutionary intellectual tradition: from José Martí, who struggled against Spanish colonialism in Cuba, to Che Guevara, the very image of 20th-century revolution. Were the decolonials their inheritors?
In our conversation, Mignolo described the 1960s at the National University of Córdoba as ‘paradise’, until the Argentine Revolution of 1966 cracked down on freedom of speech and forced many of his professors into exile. His interests as a young man ranged from literature to anthropology to experimental short films and documentary. Upon graduating in 1969, Mignolo received, from the University of Córdoba’s humanities faculty, a grant to study in Paris, where he met the exiled Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, who introduced him to Barthes. For the first time in Paris, Mignolo understood himself as a ‘sudaca’ – as marginalised and inferior to his French colleagues due to his South American provenance.
Barthes and the French literary theorist Gérard Genette directed Mignolo’s dissertation, a ‘response to [the Russian linguist Roman] Jakobson’s key question: what makes a verbal message a literary work of art?’ Mignolo’s first book, Elementos para una teoría del texto literario (1978), or ‘Elements for a Theory of the Literary Text’, tried to synthesise a Spanish philological tradition that used texts to trace the evolution of language. This method had not yet been applied to the literatures of Latin America. Mignolo wanted to put together a dominant approach in France – what would later be known as capital-T Theory – with the relatively marginal traditions of the Spanish-speaking world. Trained as a theorist of language, a structuralist, Mignolo’s understanding of difference and hierarchy was taking shape.
Soon, Mignolo turned his attention to colonial Latin America, at the time an obscure field even for scholars of the region. The question on everyone’s mind as the Columbus quincentenary neared was how to make sense of the European conquest and settlement of the New World, with many on the Right defending it as a civilising mission, and the Left insisting that it was a genocide. Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance was a landmark contribution to the debate. By engaging with various modes of Western and non-Western writing, alphabetical or not, Mignolo developed a ‘pluritopic hermeneutics’ of ‘colonial semiosis’ that could offer ‘a view of the Spanish (as well as the European) Renaissance from the perspective of its colonies.’ His research analysed everything from the Castilian grammarian Antonio de Nebrija to the Italian rhetorician Francesco Patrizi and the Italian historian Lorenzo Bernardo Boturini Benaducci, whose mid-18th-century history of the New World ‘completed a process by which alphabetic writing was elevated as the most desirable system.’ Mignolo described how colonisation transpired through culture and learning.
The subaltern, Mignolo was essentially saying, spoke to him
For Mignolo, knowledge devices and ‘technologies’ – the grammar book and the bound, Western codex, the dictionary and encyclopaedia, the map, Western ideas of ‘literacy’ and writing – were critical implements in the process of extermination and colonisation of the New World. He also showed how Native people adopted and transformed these European tools, infusing them with their own epistemologies. For Mignolo, colonisation changed Europe. The history of modernity could not be told without the Renaissance and, with it, the Americas. Mignolo also described how colonisation brought about complex new European theories designed to rank and classify – how to set in relation to Europe – the Native cultures and the New World as such, which were of course theorised as lower, backwards and benighted compared with Christian and European cultures. The book received the Modern Language Association’s top prize for Hispanic Studies and made Mignolo into an academic superstar.
Though much praised, The Darker Side of the Renaissance also met notable criticism. A positive review in The New York Review of Books by the historian Anthony Grafton scolded Mignolo’s inattentiveness to the European cultural and intellectual context of origin for many of his sources. Grafton also insisted that Mignolo’s thesis – ‘that Western intellectuals, from the Renaissance to the present, have characteristically seen alphabetic writing as the only true form, and codices as the only true books’ – lacked ‘complexity’. Mignolo attempted to supplant the French and German Enlightenment with the Renaissance, especially in Spain, as starting points of modernity – he opposes de Nebrija to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance. Mignolo was not much interested in Europe, despite the book’s title, and facile accounts of European thought and culture have characterised his work and the decolonial thought from which it is now inseparable.
Such limitations were evident in the afterword of The Darker Side of the Renaissance, where Mignolo makes explicit refutation of the work of Derrida. The French poststructuralist philosopher argued that the meaning of texts was never stable or finalised and, through an approach or non-method termed ‘deconstruction’, critiqued the various unexamined and unsustainable hierarchical binaries on which the Western philosophical tradition and its core texts rested. Derrida showed, in essays on Plato and Heidegger and others, that the Western philosophical tradition privileged speech and saw writing as its degraded and unreliable copy. Mignolo claimed that Derrida held an ‘evolutionary model’ of writing’s development and that he ‘remains within’ the tradition he critiqued. A rather sophistic, if not outright fallacious point, after all, how to depart entirely from something that one is critiquing in detail?
Most of all, Mignolo differed in thinking that he could, using ‘pluritopic hermeneutics’, move across ‘incommensurable conceptual frameworks’ and trace how European and Native cultures intermixed and acquired meaning in each other’s eyes. The subaltern, Mignolo was essentially saying, spoke to him. Postcolonial (or Subaltern Studies) scholars, largely from a comparatively recently decolonised South Asia – Gayatri Spivak, Homi K Bhabha, Ranajit Guha and others – would have been less sanguine about the viability of Mignolo’s method, which relied on the scholar’s never-quite-verifiable ability to access the subjectivity of the Indigenous and colonised, those whose subjectivities are by definition and necessity excluded from the historical record. The subaltern, as Spivak famously put it in 1988, cannot speak. Yet the scholarship itself was remarkably self-aware, exploring not an unmediated and purely obtained picture of the Other but finding traces and echoes of their presence in the Western epistemology that they inevitably (if subtly) transform in their wake.
Mignolo is a French-educated, blue-eyed, white Latin American man, a student of Barthes and Genette, and a tenured professor in the US, whose books were published in English. How could he claim to stand apart from colonisation or the West, to look past or behind it, to have privileged access to some undetermined beyond? To understand his claim – which intensified as Mignolo abandoned archival work and replaced it with more abstract theoretical analysis in later books like Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) and The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011), it will be helpful to look at Dussel and Quijano, the two thinkers who most influenced his project.
Dussel was educated in philosophy at the National University of Cuyo in Argentina, and graduated in 1957 before travelling to Spain to get his doctorate. He spent two years living in an Israeli kibbutz and working as a carpenter in an Arab cooperative in Nazareth before going on to study theology and history in France and Germany. He returned to Argentina definitively in 1967 to become professor of ethics at Cuyo, a position he held until his exile in Mexico in 1975 after, among other things, a Right-wing paramilitary squad bombed his home. In 1971, a philosophy collective that included other mostly Argentine philosophers like Rodolfo Kusch and the theologian Juan Carlos Scannone introduced what would come to be known as the ‘Philosophy of Liberation’.
What exactly was an ‘incorporative solidarity’? What differences were surmountable, and how?
In his contribution to their book Towards a Latin American Philosophy of Liberation (1973), Dussel argued that Kant, Hegel and Heidegger were ‘the pre-history of Latin American philosophy’. Dussel maintained that, for European philosophers, the Latin American subject was reduced to an object. Latin American, he insisted, was a definable identity that required centring in a new philosophy suited to it. He thus proposed ‘an analectic pedagogy of liberation’, arguing that Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy fundamentally could not overcome the notion of what Emmanuel Levinas termed the ‘absolute Other’. Dussel proposed instead that ‘the Other is, for us, Latin America vis-á-vis European Totality.’ Through being ‘Latin American’, Dussel – also white, of European descent – claimed for himself and his comrades access to an essential otherness from Europe.
In 1992, as he neared retirement, and still in the shadow of the conquest’s quincentennial, Dussel gave the Frankfurt Lectures. Their introduction was published as ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’ (1993) and became a landmark of decolonial thought. Dussel proposed a ‘myth of modernity’ inaugurated by Columbus’s arrival in 1492 and that used a ‘rational “concept” of emancipation’ to hide ‘an irrational myth, a justification for genocidal violence.’ This, Mignolo agrees in The Darker Side of the Renaissance, made the New World the ‘first periphery of the modern world’. Modernity, for Dussel, arises in the dialectic relation between Europe and the ‘non-European’, with the periphery being its ‘ultimate content’ and the ‘essential alterity’ of modernity. To overcome this ‘myth of modernity’, Dussel proposes once again the ‘analectic’, an ‘incorporative solidarity’ between antinomies and across differences. Here, like with Mignolo, there was vagueness, ambiguity. What exactly was an ‘incorporative solidarity’? What differences were surmountable, and how?
To unravel the ‘myth of modernity’, Dussel proposed a ‘trans-modernity’, the overcoming of the hierarchical centre-periphery relationship that, he believed, 1492 inaugurated. Mignolo followed Dussel’s ‘trans-modernity’ proposition with a 1995 essay proposing a ‘postcolonial reason’ attempting to theorise and critique modernity from the perspective of its colonies. Mignolo meant ‘postcolonial reason’ as a parallel to a ‘postmodern’ reason, which critiqued modernity from its centres in Europe and North America – the reason of the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, or of Derrida or Michel Foucault. Dussel and Mignolo both accepted ‘the rationality of the other’ as the basis for their claim that the other was knowable, but neither much cared to elaborate what they meant by rationality. Rationality was obvious, a given for Dussel – though not for Quijano, the other originator of decoloniality.
Born in 1928 and educated at the National University of San Marcos in Peru, Quijano was a lifelong Leftist militant who, starting in the 1940s and until the ’70s, was jailed and went underground multiple times for his political activities. At the same time, the language of ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, key to the work of the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch and his UN-sponsored Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), was growing in popularity. Prebisch, known as the founder of ‘dependency theory’, theorised a structure of ‘unequal terms of exchange’ in international trade between centre and peripheries to explain the near-impossibility of ‘development’, which is to say of incorporating peripheries into the centre. Quijano and his peers, electrified also by the Cuban Revolution’s promise of emancipation, absorbed versions of these ideas. During the 1960s, Quijano elaborated on dependency theory and studied urbanisation, poverty, and agrarian and Indigenous Peru. In the late-1960s, he moved to Chile to work as an analyst for the ECLA. In 1972, having returned to Peru, Quijano co-founded a revolutionary organisation, the Movimiento Revolucionario Socialista, with which he’d be involved until its dissolution in the early 1980s (with a brief exilic interlude in Mexico), leading its magazine and, allegedly, participating in direct action.
By the mid-1980s, following the armed Left’s defeat in Peru and beyond, Quijano – like many Latin American intellectuals of his generation – reevaluated his beliefs. Marxism and other ‘Eurocentred’ categories of thought, he concluded, were inadequate for understanding the historical realities of Latin America. As Quijano’s post-revolutionary essay ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’ (1991) affirmed:
that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’ … These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentred colonial domination, were even assumed to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories, then of a historical significance.
The piece developed a sprawling argument about the world’s ‘process of Eurocentrification’, detailing the particular failures of the ‘European paradigm of rational knowledge’ that placed Europe at its summit and the rest of the world in inferior, hierarchical relation.
He was searching for an expression of Latin American identity or reality that was neatly separate from Europe
For Quijano, the modern notion of race, inseparable from capitalism, was constituted through the three-tiered labour system of the Spanish colonies: white people – Creoles and non-aristocratic Europeans – were wage labourers, Native people were indentured servants, and Africans or Afro-descendants were enslaved. Race, Quijano later said, became inseparable from ‘the division of labour’ along such hierarchical lines. Riches obtained from exploiting the Americas constituted the cornerstone for modernity and capitalism, and established power dynamics and hierarchies that persist – the so-called ‘coloniality of power’. These inequalities also allowed the development of allegedly radical ‘Eurocentred’ thought, which for Quijano relied on ‘a linear and onedirectional evolutionism [that] is amalgamated contradictorily with the dualist vision of history, a new and radical dualism that separates nature from society, the body from reason … making it thus into a distorted perspective, impossible to be used, except in error.’
Quijano, like Mignolo and Dussel, did not care for Europe, reducing vast philosophical and intellectual traditions that informed his own work to one sentence. He nobly hoped for Latin Americans to ‘free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always inevitably distorted. It is time … to stop being what we are not.’ Quijano, like Dussel, was searching for an expression of Latin American identity or reality that was neatly separate from Europe, effectively in non-relation: he wanted, in the end, to turn back the clock.
Mignolo left Michigan for Duke University, where, he told me: ‘My work became more theoretically oriented with a historical background.’ Scholars like John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez had inaugurated Latin American Subaltern Studies (LASS), inspired by their South Asian counterparts. Mignolo joined them. In their founding statement, published in boundary 2 in 1993 (together with Dussel’s Frankfurt Lecture), the LASS group announced:
The present dismantling of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the end of communism and the consequent displacement of revolutionary projects, the processes of redemocratisation, and the new dynamics created by the effects of the mass media and transnational economic arrangements: these are all developments that call for new ways of thinking and acting politically.
The ‘catastrophic’ years were over, and the return to democratic rule and liberal democracy, and the extinction of most revolutionary struggle in the region, called for the examination of ‘pluralistic societies and the conditions of subalternity within these societies.’
Mignolo would not be associated with LASS for long. Per Against Abstraction (2015), a memoiristic book by the LASS scholar and Mignolo’s former colleague at Duke Alberto Moreiras, the project was ‘murdered’ during a 1998 conference at Duke titled ‘Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges’, attended by Dussel, Quijano and members of the LASS group, among others. Moreiras claims that, in his opening speech, Mignolo divided the group into the ‘properly’ postcolonial and ‘the postmodern’. A version of Mignolo’s speech was published in the opening issue of the journal that he founded in 2000, Nepantla: Views from the South, and suggested that certain ‘postmodern’ tendencies inside LASS were ‘driven by the market, by consumerism, by accumulation.’ When asked, Mignolo claimed to be unfamiliar with Moreiras’s book, and affirmed that the group, in that incarnation, ended in a meeting following the conference but that he was already leaving them behind.
Ironically, few of these mysterious subalterns are cited or named
That same year, Mignolo published Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000). It was ‘an extension of The Darker Side of the Renaissance to deal with contemporary issues,’ he told me, and, arguably, the opening salvo of the Modernity/Coloniality group that organised around him. The decolonial turn was off to the races.
Mignolo relied on Quijano and Dussel, World-Systems theory and scholars like the Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa and the Martinican theorist and critic Édouard Glissant. Local Histories/Global Designs introduced the notion of ‘colonial difference’ as ‘the space where coloniality of power is enacted … the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging’. The ‘colonial difference’, then, is something like ‘world views in collision’, the boundaries of empire, the space produced by the dynamics that Mignolo studied in The Darker Side of the Renaissance. He argued for ‘border thinking’, the ability to think across the often incompatible two sides of ‘colonial difference’ from the ‘fractured locus of enunciation’ of the never-quite-colonised subject. He also adopted the Quijano coinage that defined the decolonials: ‘modernity/coloniality’, an attempt to emphasise the inseparability of both processes.
Alas, the fine-grained archival and historical detail that made The Darker Side of the Renaissance a landmark were gone. Instead, the ‘main research for this book consisted in conversations,’ he wrote in its Preface, with students, colleagues and ‘all sorts of people outside academia, from taxi drivers to medical doctors, from female servants in Bolivia to small-industry executives, and all those who have something to say about their experiences of local histories and their perception of global designs.’ Ironically, few of these mysterious subalterns are cited or named. In their stead, we find a rocky and rollicking network of references unified only by their non-Europeanness or non-whiteness, and whose ideas are not expanded or detailed but instrumentalised into some tangential point. This was enough for Mignolo: the book’s first chapter, ‘Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference’, moves through regions and perspectives to demonstrate that, underneath widely divergent experiences of colonisation, a common thread arises. Local Histories/Global Designs mostly homogenises difference into a diffuse puddle or otherwise demonstrates what is already obvious.
Mignolo’s bad habits have, at times, come under fire. Neil Larsen, a Marxist literary scholar, described, through Mignolo’s career-spanning essay collection The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021), a ‘jargon of decoloniality’ that he compared with ‘the debasement of language in the German existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers’ as described in Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (1964). For Larsen, Mignolo’s decolonial framework is frequently essentialist and reductive, ahistorical, reliant on introducing facile and Manichean oppositions (postmodern/postcolonial, global/local, modernity/coloniality, centre/periphery) without insight. In his resistance to Marxism as ‘Eurocentred’, in Mignolo’s demand to pensar lo propio (think for yourself), in insisting on placing the Americas at the centre of world history and claiming that every other framing is inadequate, even while he found – as in Local Histories/Global Designs – common substrate around the world, Larsen finds obfuscation. Why not tarry with, for instance, the Marxist tradition, rework it, and transform it to better reflect the Latin American situation?
Mignolo’s wayward tendency towards unearned coinage and ill-conceptualised ideas is on full display in Local Histories/Global Designs. For instance, he insists on the importance of using ‘border gnosis’ instead of ‘border thinking’, as ‘gnosis’ evokes a (mystical) knowledge marginalised by the ‘epistemology and hermeneutics’ model established with the Enlightenment, and its use thus ‘open[s] up the notion of “knowledge” beyond cultures of scholarship.’ Yet it is never clear what work this terminological shift achieves – we are, in the end, still reading a scholarly book in the American tradition. There is little in Local Histories/Global Designs by way of insight, but much by way of novel vocabulary.
Mignolo’s work shifted into a reductive mode that equated certain identities with resistance
Nevertheless, in the 2000s, Mignolo became the visible face of Modernity/Coloniality, its most prominent representative. With The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011) – yet another rehashing of concepts already exhausted in The Darker Side of the Renaissance – the paradigm of ‘decoloniality’ or ‘the decolonial option’ coalesced. The Modernity/Coloniality ‘research project’ blossomed in fields like sociology, anthropology and education, even as Mignolo himself accrued detractors: the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for instance, was once accused of replying: ‘Fuck you, Walter Mignolo!’ to Mignolo’s accusations of Eurocentrism, though he later denied it. Mignolo continued to understand himself as a Latin American, ‘of the Third World’. The Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, co-founder of the Andean Oral History Workshop in La Paz, once worked closely with Mignolo, but the two fell out. Cusicanqui excoriated Mignolo, Duke’s Cultural Studies department, and Mignolo’s student and collaborator Catherine Walsh, calling decoloniality a ‘fashion’ and accusing them of having ‘regurgitated’ her ideas in a ‘depoliticised’ fashion and using them to accrue prestige and institutional rewards, a remarkable echo of what Mignolo accused the LASS ‘postmoderns’. (In correspondence with me, Mignolo responded that Cusicanqui ‘appeals to insults rather than to arguments’.)
The historian of political thought Miri Davidson argued in Sidecar in 2024 that ‘The far [R]ight wants to decolonise.’ She says the language of indigeneity, especially as articulated by Mignolo, is perfectly compatible with far-Right nativist political movements. Mignolo himself unwittingly blurbed the book of the Hindu supremacist lawyer and writer J Sai Deepak. (Mignolo later retracted the blurb.) The sympathy is unsurprising: from Local Histories/Global Designs and after, Mignolo’s work shifted into a reductive mode that equated certain identities – Latin American, for instance – with resistance. In 2018, Mignolo co-wrote On Decoloniality with his former student Walsh (now a professor in Ecuador) to synthesise his ideas as he approached retirement. He was presenting that book when I met him. Insisting on Quijano’s foundational import as a theoretician of ‘coloniality’ as modernity’s ‘darker side’, Mignolo writes: ‘Thinking without modernity … delinking from its fictions, is one major decolonial challenge.’ He now affirms: ‘each of us is responsible for our decolonial liberation.’
That night, I trudged home. Mignolo’s decoloniality, loudly presented as a new revolutionary thought, was not much beyond cliché, a misremembered and defanged version of the ideas that inspired those Mignolo sees as his predecessors, from Martí to Guevara or the legendary Inca leader Túpac Amaru. That Indigenous activist’s question – what is to be done? – was beyond his purview.
