Unfixing timelines: connecting colonial pasts and contemporary constructs

By connecting the colonial past and its presence today, we can gain deeper insight into both the colonial and contemporary periods—not just in Latin America and Europe but across the global north, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific world. This step away from the traditional geographical and temporal limits of our field takes as its point of departure the notion that colonialist scholars can offer a unique vantage point on modern and contemporary phenomena that so frequently reference Spanish colonialism. Soon after the signing of NAFTA in Mexico, for example, the newly formed Zapatista movement (EZLN) declared war on a 500-year-old legacy of conquest and colonialism, which the authoritarian Partido Institutional Revolucionario had fomented during its 70-year rule. More recently transnational artist Alfonso Cuarón stated that his film ‘Roma’ showcases not just class conflict but also social unrest that emerged from colonial and neo-colonial racial structures. Both of these examples not only cite colonial legacies as thematic remembrances of the past, they connect colonialism, modernity, and coloniality to ongoing—if still ever-changing—structures of race and power. As a scholar and teacher of Colonial Latin America, I have begun to explore ways to understand better these references to colonialism and the colonial past and their role in contemporary society. Recently, I invited four co-authors to investigate ways we might reorient our gaze to see more clearly this relationship. Rather than identify a set of entities under colonial erasure, we sought to track the operations of coloniality itself across a wide range of cultural and material production, across centuries, and across boundaries. Taking the intimate relationship between coloniality and modernity as a point of departure, our volume, Contemporary colonialities in Mexico and beyond, addresses three central questions: How does Mexican colonial history influence the definition of Mexico both from within and outside its borders? What issues rooted in coloniality recur over time and space? And finally, what cultural products can we study to illustrate, in a concrete and tangible way, the relationship between the evolution of colonialism and coloniality through history? We argue that understanding the foundational structures of Spanish colonialism provides insight into the evolution and perpetuation of practices and discourses of racial, ethnic, gender, and social exclusion rooted in Mexico’s history up to the present day. In my chapter for that volume, ‘An archaeology of coloniality,’ I argue that a spatial perspective can provide a useful lens to access the relationship between colonialism,