Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso is an Afro-Caribbean writer, researcher and professor. One of the pioneers of decolonial feminism and a student of María Lugones. She is the author of numerous essays and academic texts, as well as editor of several important anthologies on decolonial feminism. Her works have been translated into English, French, Italian, German and Portuguese.

I had the opportunity to meet María Lugones during a conference in Buenos Aires in 2003. Inescapable bodies: a dialogue on sexualities in Latin America was the title of the activity organised by the group Ají de pollo, a collective made up of feminist activists and academics, and Argentine sex-gender dissidents. The meeting, very much in tune with the publication Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler, author of obligatory reference in this meeting, brought together activists, intellectuals and academics from different parts of Latin America, at a time when queer theory was arriving and imposing itself in the main Latin American cities as a new and discovered truth about sexuality and gender.

As usual, I ended up being a discordant voice in that meeting because, although I read Butler, De Lauretis, Wittig, Foucault and the handful of cult poststructuralist authors of the moment, my approach to their positions was always from a questioning angle. In my presentation, I tried to make a critical review of performativity from my own theoretical position, while questioning the way in which it was uncritically embraced by feminism and sex-gender dissidence in Latin America. I did so with the theoretical-conceptual tools I had at hand at the time, at a moment when I was on the verge of, but had not yet encountered, the budding decolonial critique. Despite this, the exhibition subsequently published (1) manages to launch a series of questions in line with the type of concerns that I will develop in greater depth in my decolonial stage.

(1) See: Espinosa-Miñoso, Yuderkys (2004). "A decade of performativity: of mistaken assumptions and misunderstandings". In J. Fernández, M. D'Uva, P. Viturro (Comps.), Cuerpos Ineludibles. Un diálogo a partir de las sexualidades en América Latina. Ediciones Ají de Pollo, Buenos Aires.

From this conference I have two important memories: on the one hand, the epistemic violence, the Eurocentric arrogance and the deep racism that I had to face from some of the delegates at the event. On the other, the encounter with Lugones, who would play a major role in the later development of my ideas and the radical change I would later make.

In my memory, María caught my attention immediately. The impression she gave was that of a person who did not quite fit in with her surroundings. Maria was wearing trousers and shirt in the way chongas, that is, male performance tortilleras, usually dress. There she sat, waiting her turn, a mask covering half her face. I would later learn from her that she was actually in Buenos Aires for a kidney transplant and was therefore immunosuppressed.

I make the effort to remember her as accurately as I can, given how long ago it was. I remember seeing this somewhat shy and "weird" lady who, as she spoke, made 'wise old lady' gestures. I did not know who she was, I had never heard her name, but when she spoke, I was captivated. I understood almost nothing of what she said, but, for some reason, perhaps more intuitive than anything else, I knew that we were in tune, that something united us.

(2) Maria's intervention at the congress was later collected in the same book published by Fernandez, D'Uva and Viturro

At this meeting Maria introduced herself as part of feminism of colour in the U.S., said she hated the word lesbian because she "had nothing to do with Western things or with the island of Lesbos" and, from now on, until her death, she was disassociating herself from queer theorising. She did so at the crest of this wave in Argentina, before it became as popular worldwide as it later was. The philosopher pointed out that she was reflecting on the difference between "being" and "being-ness" as theorised by Rodolfo Kusch, an Argentine philosopher whom she had just translated into English, and her intervention focused on showing what Kusch's thought contributed to her in order to think about her experience as a "coloured jack". For Maria there was a radical difference between Kusch's thinking and her own, and postmodern theorising for what she saw as a hasty rejection of identity. In her short speech she pointed out the need to abandon the analysis that masked "the interconnectedness between class, sexuality, race, colonization and sex" and noted that the rejection of essence should not come from a kind of Eurocentrism or Westernism. Finally she spoke of the inseparability of experience and the need for a "pilgrimage" to other cosmologies and other worlds outside modernity (2).

‘Jota de colour’ is a local usage to refer to “non-heterosexual woman”, equivalent to "lesbian" in the Western name.

You will understand why, even though for lack of references I did not understand much of what Lugones was talking about at the time, I felt a strong connection with her. Much of the vocabulary she used in her presentation was loaded with concepts that would eventually become central to my thinking. She confirmed many of my intuitions at the time and I was curious about her work. What I didn't realise was that this "jota de colour" was in the midst of a turning point in her thinking and theoretical interests. By 2003 Maria had just published Peregrinajes and in 2008 she would publish Coloniality and Gender.

With the passing of time our paths would converge and she would become one of my greatest teachers.

But I did not meet María again until 2011, in another international meeting, this time held in Bolivia and to which we were invited along with some voices of community feminism. By then a lot had already happened, both in my life and in hers. I had already read several of her texts and I quoted her everywhere in my work and at conferences; in fact, we were both already part of decolonial feminism and we were widely involved in the task of expanding it and taking the critique of white feminism everywhere.

It's interesting to note that in 2008 I wrote Ethnocentrism and coloniality in Latin American feminisms: Complicities and the consolidation of feminist hegemony in transnational spaces. It was the same year that Lugones' Colonialidad y género was published, yet I did not have access to this text until the following year when my article was already in print. By that time, however, I had already read a lot of black and women of colour feminist theory, and also Lugones's work Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Colour Feminism. In addition, I had the critical reflections that we had been making as independent feminists since the 1990s, when we were denouncing the feminist hegemony allied with the neoliberal governments of that decade, subject to the prescriptions of  the World Bank, multilateral debt agencies, the United Nations system and "development aid" agencies. Independent women of that time did not believe that the recently inaugurated transnational women's rights agenda would be of any use to the majority of women in the region. We did not believe in the State, in its institutions, or in an agenda for women endorsed by global powers with the complicity of the dominant institutional feminism of the day. So, in a critical reading of Chandra Mohanty, drawing on Spivak's warnings and my own experience in this article, I conclude that the problem is ultimately not, as Mohanty pointed out, the colonialism of the feminisms of the North towards the feminisms of the South, but rather it is about the coloniality of our feminisms. In the text, intuitively, I state without further reference that the problem of our feminism is not colonialism but coloniality, and by this I mean the way in which the dominant feminists of the South capture and encrypt the subaltern through their representation, whilst upholding their commitments to Northern feminism and its colonialism. In short, white and white-mestizo bourgeois or gentrified feminists coming from the national elites in Latin America gave continuity to colonialism by being complicit with the interests of white European and North American feminism and with their own class (3) This was the turning point in my career and from where, a few years later, I met Maria face to face again. The complicity was instantaneous. Maria treasured a radical critique thanks to her passage through the coloured and third world feminism in the U.S., which connected us at once.

(3) See in Espinosa-Miñoso, Y. (2009). "Etnocentrismo y colonialidad en los feminismos latinoamericanos: Complicidades y consolidación de las hegemonías feministas en el espacio transnacional", Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer, Nº 33, Vol. 14, pp. 37-54.

By the time we met in Bolivia, both Maria and I had somehow already taken the substantive steps towards the path we would find ourselves walking together. By that time I had already invited some compañeras to the founding of GLEFAS in 2007 and we had assumed ourselves to be decolonial feminists, following the call launched by Maria through her writings. Thanks to this early assumption, GLEFAS ended up becoming a collective project that affirmed and contributed substantively to the development and expansion of decolonial feminism. Thus, from that meeting in Bolivia, Maria and I became very close. Lugones' visits to Buenos Aires helped to deepen a great friendship and collaboration. If her visits coincided with me being home, we would spend the afternoons together talking. More than talking, these meetings became a space for intensive classes with the teacher - afternoons where I listened avidly to Maria's thoughts about the world. She generously shared with me the keys to her thinking and I could only feel deeply grateful. Her keys to reading did not come only from books, they came with her experience of the world. Gripped, I listened to the story of her life as the origin of her thinking, a story full of anecdotes of what she had lived in and out of the context of feminism of colour in the U.S., her encounter with Aníbal Quijano and with the initial group of intellectuals and academics of the anticolonial shift. She would always arrive bursting with new stories and would update me on the latest developments in her thinking. As time went by and I felt more confident to add my own voice to hers; I was able to interrupt her soliloquies and talk to her about the intricacies and machinations of Latin American feminism, of which she, because of age and distance, knew less; on some occasions I even dared to challenge her opinions.

I was fortunate to hear her most important ideas directly from her, some of which were in articles I had already read, others were in full production and that were published in later articles, and even revisions or clarifications of some of her main ideas. The misunderstandings about some of her approaches was something that tormented and angered her, but at the same time served as a way for her to try to explain or improve her arguments. Her explanations accompanied my reading of the articles she was publishing, as well as my own developing thinking. In this way, I became a close disciple, which allowed me to continue advancing, improving and deepening my own work. Thus I came to master very early on what she meant by gender coloniality in the midst of so many errors of interpretation: I understood her refusal to use the category woman to apply to the native "women" of Abya Yala and to African trafficked women and their descendants; I understood her distancing from the use of the concept of patriarchy, her contestation of the category of gender and her problematization of the identity reaffirmation present in the universal use of the terminologies of lesbian, homosexual, trans and cisgender in extra-European contexts; likewise her obsession with the idea of "permeability" as opposed to impermeability, as well as the importance of thinking from "relationship". I was also able to understand what from her point of view constituted the limit of intersectionality and the need to overcome it. Something that enhanced the critiques that both I, as well as Ochy Curiel, had already been making.

There are thousands of anecdotes that accumulate in my living memory of the teacher that constitute part of my formative time as the Caribbean and decolonial thinker that I have become.

On one occasion, in a conversation between her, Arturo Escobar and me in some bar in Buenos Aires, a conversation that my friend Iris Hernández as a witness was kind enough to record and transcribe, María said, and I quote verbatim: "I am a philosopher and I have renounced philosophy, because it is ahistorical. It is of no use, but anyway it is where I come from to a certain extent". This statement helps us understand Maria's commitment to a political wager on the world anchored in epistemic diversity and deeply critical of the Eurocentrism of her discipline.

On the occasion prior to this meeting in Buenos Aires, at an academic meeting I organised with Arturo Escobar at the University of Chappel Hill in North Carolina, I saw María crying as she attempted to establish an intersubjective relationship with Julieta Paredes, founder of community feminism. Maria was crying, deeply distressed at the impossibility of 'thinking with her'. She had that capacity with which I identify, to 'feel-think' things. Each thing she thought is associated with a feeling, with a deep capacity for empathy and interconnectedness.

I don't want to give the impression that I think Maria was perfect, nothing like that. The Maria of my memory enjoys as many imperfections and shadows as those of any mortal. I recall a disagreement Carmen Cariño and I had with her regarding the anti-colonial critique of dehumanisation. As you may know, for Fanon as for Quijano and the whole decolonial turn, coloniality is based on a great first racial world classification of labour that divided the world into "human-non-human". The point is that from there derive formulations that would seem to claim that place of humanity as a place that is denied and should be rectified. Carmen and I argued that this claim of humanity is problematic because it would be to accept humanisation as a natural place common to the whole species. On the contrary, we affirmed this classification as proper to the modern ethos since it implied the human-nature separation and the hierarchisation within this pair. We reminded her that this separation is not such in relational ontologies. And, well, the teacher got angry, very angry. In the middle of the conversation she walked away indignantly, slamming the door. Carmen and I laughed at her closed-mindedness, knowing that what we were saying were conclusions to which some of the postulates she herself held were leading us. The next day, at breakfast, the teacher sits down at the table and tells us: "I thought about it and it's true, you are right.