The Open Borders of Latin America: A Descolonial Hope of Being

This thesis is an autoethnographic research rooted in descolonial feminist theories exploring ‘methodologías otras’ (altern methodologies) in the imbricated intersectionalities of (dis)ability, forced migration and motherhood. This is a mother-activist’s learning research story about how to enact descolonial feminist activist research in Colombia with Venezuelan refugee mothers, whose children may or may not have a labelled (dis)ability, and with professionals working in the NGO refugee sector in Bogota.

The starting point is my positionality as a Venezuelan psychologist and mother of a child with an autistic label, working within the modern Psyche apparatus as well as descolonial allyship with families inhabiting (dis)ability and forced migration. I am a mother looking for altern spaces of knowledge production with borderland ‘mestiza’ northerned eyes. Various research pauses, a global pandemic and the largest migration on my continent led me to an activist route to co-found a Refugee Led Organisation (RLO) in allyship with Venezuelan refugee women. These pauses and experiences changed the research questions towards ethical reflexivity on how to enact decolonial research, not purport to represent others' voices and how to descolonise my northerned ‘mestiza’ self.

This thesis draws on some critiques on intersectionality from descolonial feminism and on the genealogies of ‘Otherings’ to imagine beyond the universalising dominant psyche discourses of the Global North. The genealogical turn of decolonial feminists opens up fundamental questioning of the very notions I set out to explore: disability and migration. The explorations in this thesis are not intended to be complete genealogical explanations but rather a questioning of the categorical logic that produces ‘othering’ and hence necessitated the reformulation of the research questions that included ‘othering’ notions. In this sense this thesis describes a methodological exploration of ‘metodologias otras’ with love and a descolonial hope of being in the spaces of activism, motherhood and refugee communities.