Introduction: From Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges to Nepantla

In February of 1994, at the end of the second meeting of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group at Ohio University, Duke University was scheduled to be responsible for the fifth meeting (the first meeting was held at George Mason University in 1992). In the meantime the third was held in Puerto Rico in 1996; the fourth at the College of William and Mary in April of 1997. In between, there was a special meeting with Ranajit Guha at Rice University in March of 1995. The fifth meeting took place at Duke in October of 1998, under the form of an interdisciplinary and international workshop called “Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges.”

A parallel story developed at Duke between February 1994 and October 1998. This story ended up in the idea of and the need for a journal as a space of intersection for Latin American, Latino, American, subaltern, postcolonial, and cultural studies which began to grow at Duke with the support and encouragement of Duke University Press. The journal responded to the need that emerged as a consequence of the intensive interdisciplinary dialogue between what has been taking place between the humanities and the social sciences in approximately the past six years. When the time to organize the fifth meeting at Duke came, the idea of connecting the meeting with the initiation of the new journal—Nepantla: Views from South—arose. The intersection between the journal and the meeting of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was a happy coincidence. Since the aspirations we have for Nepantla only partially coincide and largely exceed the goals the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group has settled for itself, the meeting was transformed into an international and interdisciplinary workshop that responded to the platform of the journal. In any event, the need to promote dialogue between people engaged in diverse intellectual projects, but with common interests in social transformations (which include, of course, the transformation of the university), dictated and shaped the workshop in consonance with Nepantla’s design.

By doing so, we thought to satisfy the two basic principles implied in the title and subtitle of the journal. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word describing the “in-between situation” in which the Aztecs saw themselves in the sixteenth century, as they were placed in between ancient Aztec wisdom and the ongoing Spanish colonization. Views from South, on the other hand, suggests the connection between Nepantla as used by Nahuatl-speaking people in Mexico and the appropriation by Chicanos/as in the Southwest of the United States today (Anzaldúa 1987; Mora 1993). The Nepantla notion, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, inscribed and continues to inscribe in the history of the modern colonial world the changing borders of colonial expansion, the double side of modernity/coloniality. But if Nepantla comes from the history of Spanish colonization, its metaphorical meaning can be extended to nineteenth-century British and French expansion to Asia and Africa, or to the borders reproduced by current global coloniality and the growing hegemony of the North Atlantic. Nepantla, finally, and as the story of its emergence indicates, links the geohistorical with the epistemic with the subjective, knowledge with ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and nationality in power relations. The “in-between” inscribed in Nepantla is not a happy place in the middle, but refers to a general question of knowledge and power. The kind of power relations inscribed in Nepantla are the power relations sealing together modernity and what is inherent to it, namely, coloniality.

Furthermore, and stretching the connotations of the word South a bit, it also brings to the foreground the South as a metaphor “for global suffering under global capitalism,” as Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos will have it (de Sousa Santos 1995, 1998); it also refers to the South of the Americas, and the South of the United States, as a metaphor for Latinos/as, Hispanics, Latin Americans, and Amerindians in the...