Tribute
María Cristina Lugones had a special relationship with Buenos Aires, the city where she was born in 1944. She knew the city through its music shops, the background murmurs of its cafes and tango salons, and the schools she attended. Buenos Aires was her city, yet she didn’t quite fit. Once, having already started college in the United States, she returned for a visit. The doorman at her parents’ building in the tony neighborhood of Recoleta sent her around back to use the service entrance. It was only later, in feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s, that she began to find ways of understanding this experience in terms of the intermeshing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. It wasn’t something random, she recognized, since in her childhood home she had always been known as la negrita, the little dark one.
Growing up in Argentina and then living in different parts of the United States formed a well-spring of experiences she returned to as the basis for her theoretico-practical path. By contesting familiar ground along this path, she fostered circles of resistant company within and across antiracist, anti-colonial, and U.S. Third World feminisms. María’s lifework spans over five decades, foregrounding the reconstitution of subjects and engaging coalitional politics as feminist philosopher, popular educator, professor, author, and community organizer. Until her death in Syracuse, New York, on July 14, 2020, María was a tireless fighter whose political activism both fed and drew on these contributions, enriching interconnected worlds, from the struggle to end all forms of racist and gender violence to her theorization of resistance within social movements, from her practice of popular education to the formation of grassroots coalitions, especially among women of color, and finally to her more recent theorization of the coloniality of gender, heterosexualism, and decolonial feminisms.
It was vitally important to her that people come together across their differences, to understand each other deeply, to learn to treat each other well and to form coalitions against interconnected oppressions. This is particularly true in her feminist work, and how she tried to build connections among women, but she really embraced differences and tried to initiate and deepen coalitions among all people, taking into consideration the very different places where we originate and that inform our sensibilities and tendencies. Motivated by radical love, her popular pedagogy sought to equip people to overcome what she called, early in her career, the “map of oppression.” Oppressive structures designate maps of where people can move and where they are restricted from moving. “Trespassing” for her took on a political heft. María looked for company, she strove for political companionship, trespassing across boundaries of difference. These practical and concrete ways of tapping into the resistant possibility of subject formation gave rise to influential philosophical pieces, many of which found their home in Hypatia. Her argument that connected these themes received its clearest, most extended and significant formulation in her critically acclaimed book Pilgrimages / Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
After her formative years in Argentina, María came to the United States for college in the late 1960s under difficult personal and political circumstances. She studied philosophy at UCLA as an undergraduate and received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in philosophy in 1978. While in graduate school María initiated a feminist consciousness-raising group with Claudia Card, and became involved with lesbian feminism. Her doctoral thesis, Morality and Personal Relations, focused on the concept of friendship in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
At Wisconsin, she also began to pour herself into Paulo Freire and Myles Horton’s praxis of raising critical consciousness in grassroots communities. Her political work in this vein in Latinx, Chicanx and New Mexican Hispanx communities led her to co-found with two compañeros the Escuela Popular Norteña (EPN) in Valdez, New Mexico. A center for popular education, EPN would serve as a significant focus for her political projects in the following decades.
María’s approach to philosophy and politics was embodied in her principle, “I won’t think what I won’t practice.” Between the 1970s and the 1980s, she developed a qualified affinity with lesbian separatism. She engaged lesbian feminism as a way of loving other women well, in all their diversity. However, she concluded, in order to fight white supremacy, one needed communities, deeply hybridized communities, such as urban people from barrios and communities of color, rural Hispanxs from the Southwest, persons with disabilities, and queer collectives. She took lesbian separatism seriously, and formed deep, enduring friendships, especially with Sarah Hoagland, Jackie Anderson, and others. It was through this fruitful engagement that she developed her idea of “curdled” separation, drawing the image from a failed attempt to whip mayonnaise for her mother as a child, “Mamá, la mayonesa se separó!” Putting the figure of “impure” mestizas at the core, she argued for an impure separation, one that includes other “transitionals, liminals, and border-dwellers.”
Another community which was central to her development, and in turn deeply influenced by her contributions, was the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) and especially Midwest SWIP, where she led efforts to transform the norms of the discipline by centering the perspectives and wisdom of women of color-- an identity which she understood as a political coalition rather than a demographic. Her work blossomed in the collaborative environment of Midwest SWIP, where she also delighted on the dance floor. During her frequent visits to Argentina, she played an important role in the development of the Argentine Association of Women in Philosophy (AAMF). In 2015 SWIP recognized the significance and influence of her work by honoring her with the award for Distinguished Woman in Philosophy.
Through her deep connection with multiple communities, she came to name the practice of world-traveling (1987), going from one to another world of sense. World-traveling was motivated by a spirit of experimentation, of risking one’s self-understanding, of coming to see the world the way another sees it. She called this kind of risk-taking “playfulness.” “Playfulness in me, for me, is not a frivolous, disposable quality in me or in my loving. It is at the crux of liberation.” In this way, she wove together theory and practice in the formation of coalitions among people with “non-dominant differences” to use Audre Lorde’s phrase. Praxis drove the theory and theory informed her path. She theorized the social margins as a time-space of liminality, where people were not restricted by fixed definitions or meanings. These time-spaces of liminality could engender the art of tantear the social, to probe the social, delicately sensing the location of bodies, with the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen if we move or settle in. Los marginales, in María’s words, explore the textures and cracks of the social, the corners and niches, from which spring pockets of social resistance, including the most subtle displays of active subjectivity that are hard to note. For María, coalitions are always spaces-in-formation, spaces of re-humanization, (co)existence, interdependence, apprenticeship and comprehension of oppressive structures and lived resistance, inter-connection, intersubjective construction of meaning, interculturality, and inter-versality. Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Elizabeth Spelman, M. Jaqui Alexander, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Chela Sandoval were important interlocutors, friends, and influenced her thinking. She also drew on Latin American poetry, anarchist theory, and Chicanx literature in her writing.
María felt a sense of “border-dwelling friendship” with Gloria Anzaldúa, as if they were “hermanas en pensamiento” (1992). They both invoked experiences of marginality, double and triple consciousness, that many Latinx feminists have carefully theorized. María recognized early on that the relations between philosophy and Latinx populations emerge from multiple interstices, from those betwixt spaces where resistance finds its sociality. She found germinating stasis in Anzaldúa’s depiction of “intimate terrorism,” the type of immobilization that incites new mestizas to search for unprecedented meaning and complex communication. Like Anzaldúa, María cherished storytelling, folk songs, cantares, poems, and other forms of vernacular wisdom. María’s philosophical stance entailed theorizing the social backing that the enactment of culture lends to enduring collectives of resistance. Both of their theoretical contributions have transformed the scope and reach of Latinx feminist philosophy, in ways that have reverberated through the present in the thinking of a constellation of philosophers that includes, among others, Ofelia Schutte, Linda Martín Alcoff, Chela Sandoval, Laura Pérez, Mariana Ortega, Paula Moya, Michael Hames-Garcia, and Ernesto Martinez.
Her two decades teaching at Carleton College were fruitful if personally difficult. She formed lasting ties with generations of students whose lives she transformed. Former students recall her intellectual rigor and high academic standards, her integrity, and the revolutionary turns she gave to their thinking. She could be both earnest and deeply ironic. She was involved in several political projects during her time there, especially related to feminist and LGBTQ+ liberation, but also including the anti-apartheid divestment campaigns that roiled US campuses in the 1980s. Before leaving Carleton for Binghamton, she joined the culture wars in fighting for diversity requirements and non-Western cultures.
In 1993, María was appointed Director of Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where she also taught in the Program in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture. She began to build bridges in three directions, the grassroots struggle to eliminate all forms of gender violence against women of color, a novel understanding of the convergence of global patterns-structures of power with decolonial movements, and the debates emerging from indigenous/Native people and people of African descent about sovereignty and, specifically, their own epistemic and material resources as they aim toward a buen vivir.
The struggle against all forms of gender violence led María to the concept of “harm-free zones,” a goal that emerged from popular education workshops at the Escuela Popular Norteña during an encuentro involving activists from communities across North America and the Caribbean working to end violence perpetrated against women of color. In a similar vein, María collaborated with INCITE! a network of radical feminists of color working against violence. She also co-designed the Politics of Women of Color Workshop at Binghamton, with the participation of Shireen Roshanravan, Gabriela Veronelli, Jen-Feng Kuo and others. They pushed for an end to police violence, the abolition of state violence/the abolition of a police state, and the establishment of community alternatives to the criminal justice system. Kindred to the Black Lives Matter movement, they sought to dismantle the police.
Her engagement with non-hegemonic feminisms in Latin American began in the 1990s. The region is known by contemporary decolonial feminists as Abya Yala, or land of full maturity in the Indigenous Kuna language. In the work of the Taller de Historia Oral [Oral History Workshop] in Bolivia, including one of its co-founders, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, María encountered an analysis of the connection between capitalist exploitation, indigenous thinkers, Aymara migrant women, and colonial oppression. She drew on this analysis with the spirit of what she referred to as epistemic coalition, examining the hemispheric connections laid out by the work on the marginalization of women of color in North America among feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Emma Pérez, Elsa Barkley Brown, Audre Lorde, and Paula Gunn Allen.
Beginning in the early 2000s, María lived periodically in Maimará, a village in the Argentine Andes as well as in Cochabamba and La Paz, Bolivia. Living among the inhabitants of Maimará, María learned to weave the rhythm of thinking at base in the Americas with the meditations of philosopher Rodolfo Kusch. With Joshua Price, she translated one of Kusch’s books as Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (Duke, 2010). Andean cosmologies initiated her decolonial turn. Through Filomena Miranda Casas, her Aymara-language teacher, María came to recognize that reciprocity, or ayni, the communal organization of Andean material life, stands in opposition to the colonial introduction of gender as the organizing principle of the division of labor, the public-private split, sexuality and reproduction. In doing so, she was following and advancing various decolonial ways of countering the devaluation of women in the Bolivian altiplano.
These engagements paved the way for María to join the modernity/(de)coloniality working group. She found there a collective to theorize and maneuver within the decolonial in the company of Aníbal Quijano, her colleague at Binghamton University, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Edgardo Lander, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Zulma Palermo and Catherine Walsh, among others. María’s contribution was key. In her loving, critically and politically constructive way, María turned the group towards internal critique, positioning gender and sexuality as not simply one more category of difference, ancillary to race and class, but rather as constitutive, along with racial difference, of colonial difference. Despite the limitations she saw in Quijano’s model of the coloniality of power, including its heteronormative assumptions and binary understanding of biological sex, she did not reject it. Instead, she expanded it, and complicated it, giving it a more rigorous foundation. María’s contributions to Abya Yala feminisms would later find, in the last decade of her life, interlocution in the Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudio, Formación, y Acción Feministas (Latin American Group for Feminist Study, Formation and Action).
The framework of the coloniality of gender is perhaps the best known throughout Latin America, as well as in the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Making visible the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality, María suggests that women of color are co-constituted, even as they are oppressed, by the coloniality of power and the coloniality of gender in a way that are inseparable. In this way, she disrupted the hegemony of white and first-world feminisms in Latin America and established the terms for decolonial feminisms. She put into evidence how men’s violence, complicity, and collaboration, including that of men of color, have been part of the same legacy of colonialism. Men who are placed within the dark side of the colonial/modern gender system, she argued, are ill-equipped to see violence against women of color both in everyday life and in theories of oppression and liberation.
At Binghamton, María was also the inspiration for and co-founder of the Center for Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture, a collective for politics and theory. She understood the epistemic, geopolitical, and even ontological importance of breaking with Eurocentric knowledge. She began to investigate what is sometimes referred to as sentipensar, feeling-thinking, thinking that does not separate reason from emotion, or make the nature/culture split. She put a critique of the subject/object divide in Western social sciences and humanities at the core of CPIC. Knowledge and understanding that did not maintain dualist ontologies and the subject/object split still lacks legitimacy in many academic disciplines; for these kinds of theoretical knowledges to flourish, they need community, and in this case intellectual community. Collective subjectivity, embodied proximity, shifting perceptions, are all necessary ingredients for communal alternatives to dominant knowledge. María, as mentor and friend, offered her home for meetings and gatherings where people would come together to construct political visions, and for a kind of mutual support that the university denied them. “Lugo” as she was called, initiated this collective interconnection to build up young scholars, especially (but not only) young intellectuals of color, but also people whom she loved and cared for, and who loved and cared for her.
María’s work has received recognition throughout the world, including by the Caribbean Philosophical Association which, in 2020, awarded her the prestigious Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. María’s texts have been translated into Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Mandarin. Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones Lugones (SUNY, 2019) is an interdisciplinary anthology that takes up María’s contributions in multiple fields. The Spanish translation of Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes will be published in 2021. She was finishing a book-long manuscript on decolonial feminisms at the time of her passing. María’s teachings will continue enacting the practice of tantear as they seek homes where to dwell and flourish. Her teaching, scholarship, and example will continue to help us, the survivors, feel our way through the social, as she might put it, looking for worlds in which to germinate.
María’s family says that she wanted to be a semilla, a seed. She knew how to engender germination in others, in ways that spanned the open and visible as well as the intimate and personal. She had a very particular concept of family that emphasized less blood ties than connections made through conversation and different forms of collective engagement. To speak with her in this context of philosophy and what she termed theoretico-practical was to participate in a celebration that did not disavow oppressive structures. She ignited thinking in others, drew it out of students, siblings, friends and colleagues. Dialogue with her was a way of building a weave of ideas, ideas to critique and change the world and fill it with possibility. In her creativity, she had an attention to detail, to integrity, balance, history, spontaneity, and beauty, including weird, original experiments with the beautiful. If María invited a person to a meal, it was sumptuous, generous, and giving: to visit her house was to be invited to an intimate world, where the details stopped you at every turn, surrounding you, and filling your imagination with color, texture, and stories. Her birthdays and New Year’s parties were a delirious merry-go-round of sound, music, dance, and invention, and always included gifts she had gathered carefully and cards with her own original illustrations and moving, thoughtful narratives that were almost secret messages, and even songs dedicated to each recipient. She always dressed magnificently for the occasion and brought a ludic elegance to the festivities. She would play piano, honoring and reconstructing tangos with her deep alto voice; her rendering of “Yo soy Graciela Oscura” was unforgettable. These tangos, like the blues, were filled with anguish and a sense of displacement.
Even though dislocation and displacement was a basic condition of her work and life, María created a homeplace wherever she was. Her writing on streetwalking, traveling, trespassing, curdling separation and even playfulness are all reflections of this striving for collectivist politics. This tension between displacement, peregrinaje and collective home took on an added dimension in 2012, when she visited the National University of Comahue in Argentina. She would always remember the people she met from the Puel Pvjv and Mañke communities. In contrast to her experience with that doorman many years before in Buenos Aires, one Mapuche compañera asked her, “Sister, why did you move so far away?”
Meeting María Cristina Lugones was like one of those visits to her home, an invitation to enter a world, a rich, complicated, singular world, full of histories of pain, but also of creativity, experimentation, and sociality. She walked between and among worlds. Her tonal was the crow, crafty, highly social, and often found stealing space and goodies from creatures with more brute power. Her love of birds, trees, and the garden she tended with such care was connected to her immersion in sentipensar, a sensory engagement with the nonhuman world around her. She adored her dog Wawa and late cat Zohar, whom she considered inter-species amautas—the Quechua word for wise-person or philosopher. Today we bid a collective adiós to our hermana, compañera, teacher, philosopher, comrade, peregrina, in that tortillera style of initiating and coquettishly responding to an outlawed dance that was and shall be her tango.
For further readings by María Lugones, see Pedro DiPietro, Jennifer WcWeeny, and Shireen Roshanravan (eds.). 2019. Speaking Face to Face. The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones, pp. 291-97. Albany: SUNY.
Co-authors: Pedro DiPietro (activist/scholar, Syracuse University), Joshua M. Price (activist/scholar, Binghamton University), Leonor Lugones, Agustina Veronelli, and Silvana Veronelli (Lugones Family), Catherine Walsh (militant intellectual, Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar-Ecuador), Members of CPIC (Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton University).
A modified version of this essay first appeared in Spanish as "Homenaje a la investigadora y lesbofeminista María Lugones: La filósofa peregrina” in Soy, a weekly magazine of the newspaper Página12 (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Reprinted with their kind permission. Translation by Joshua Price.