Un futuro sin conquistadores (A Future without Conquistadors) Available to Purchase

The coda examines the 2020 toppling of the statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar, Spanish conquistador and “founder” of the Colombian city of Popayán. A symbolic act by indigenous Misak leaders, the toppling occurred in the wake of years of indigenous organizing against the impacts of the five-hundred-year-old Discovery Doctrine. The author reads the demonumenting action as performing a speculative mode for alternative geographies and futures, against the predetermined teleologies of settler futurity, which cast indigenous and black Colombian life as death-bound. The demonumenting is what feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick has called a “geographic act,” a liberatory respatialization of the material and political landscape amid the unfreedoms of ongoing settler colonial violence and government failures to transition Colombian society into any true shape of collective peace and justice. As an iteration of a decolonizing speculative geography, it subverts the regime of Discovery and unfetters the land and the future from it.