Acompañamiento as Decoloniality: The Struggle to be Human in the Borderlands

Thursday, November 21

8:00 AM - 9:45 AM

Location: Vancouver CC EAST, Room 7

Presenter(s)

ES

Enrique Sepúlveda

Assistant Professor
University of Colorado Boulder

How do the existential concerns of people in mobility and transgression help us understand new ways of belonging and citizenry in times of decoloniality? How can migrating borderland subjects, educators, and activists engage and dialogue to chart a new course of ethics and communal principles to combat globalization and the neo-liberal order that seeks to commodify and racialize them? In my scholarly work and relationships with migrant Latinx youth and their families, I have come to see their everyday life experiences and struggles to realize their full humanity as key sources of knowledge and cultural production—what Anzaldúa called border

conocimiento—to answer the questions above. In this paper I argue that the cultural practice of acompañamiento, a communal resource and response by borderlands subjects to assist one another to counter the ideological and structural violence of the colonial world system aimed at them, is based on border subjects’ recognition of what Fanon (1967) calls their own value and self-worth on their own terms. This paper presentation will highlight organ acts of acompañamiento by borderlands subjects to illustrate how everyday people delink (Mignolo, 2015) from western systems of knowledge at the underside of modernity (Dussel,1996) in order to humanize and reimagine themselves and their futures.