Thinking Otherwise: Decoloniality, Knowledge, and Legitimacy

My decolonial journey starts with how I see myself: as a woman descended from Native peoples and as a Christian theologian who reflects on God. I recognize that both are part of who I am. For years, I have struggled to affirm both sides of my identity and to value my own existence without feeling forced to choose between them.

I start with my own story, my family, and my roots. I look to my community, the land, and the histories that have shaped us. As a theologian, I ask how I can pay attention to these experiences and do a theology from Abya Yala that brings together ancestral knowledge, Christian beliefs, and spiritual practices. I want to do this without diminishing any part, but instead with humility.

This is where I start to think otherwise.

I did not approach decoloniality in search of a theory. Instead, the everyday experiences of Abya Yala and its colonial history raised questions I could not ignore: What happens when people whose knowledge has been overlooked become the main voices in creating knowledge?

This question has had a strong impact on my theological work. I have learned that theological knowledge does not come only from seminaries, books, or universities. It is also grounded in memory, land, spirituality, community, struggle, and daily life. My experience in both psychology and theology has shown me this clearly. The words we use to talk about religious identity, spirituality, and theology are never neutral. They reflect certain histories, beliefs, and power structures that shape whose knowledge is valued, whose voices are heard, and which ways of knowing are seen as legitimate.

First, I no longer see Native people and their spiritual practices only as subjects to be studied. Native people and communities should also be recognized as creators of theological knowledge.

Second, I have stopped seeing knowledge as something universal and now understand it as connected to specific places, histories, and times. What is often called “universal knowledge” usually comes from a Eurocentric point of view, a particular history and culture that has claimed the right to speak for everyone. Decolonial thinking in Abya Yala encourages us to look back to our roots and see that our ancestral knowledge and ways of knowing are valuable on their own.

Third, I have moved from focusing mainly on written texts to valuing knowledge that comes from lived experience. I now question why written theology is often seen as more important than knowledge that comes from daily life and community. Oral histories, ancestral memories, women’s stories, rituals, connections to the land, everyday spirituality, and Indigenous ways of knowing are also important sources for theology.

These changes have influenced both the questions I ask and how I write. Now I pay as much attention 

to where the knowledge comes from, whose voices are missing, and how power works through academic language and institutions as I do to the idea itself.

In recent years, when I present about Abya Yala theology, I often face tough questions: “Is this Christianity?” “Is this syncretism?” “Is this theology?” Sometimes, these questions show the limits of the categories used to judge a theology who embrace Native spiritual practices and identity.

This means we have to both unlearn and learn. Decolonial theology is not something we finish and leave behind. It is an ongoing process of questioning the ideas we have inherited and showing that there are other ways to do theology.

A major change for me came when I stopped asking how Native spiritualities could fit into Christian categories. Instead, I began to think about God without limiting God to one culture or theological framework.

This change has been especially important in my work with women doing theology in Abya Yala. Their work challenges the idea that Christianity must always be defined by categories from certain historical and cultural backgrounds. For those of us who identify with our Native ancestry and histories, this process gives us new freedom to think about God in broader ways and to reject the idea that there is only one right way to understand faith, spirituality, or theology.

The world is not made up of just one story or one way of knowing. There are many ways to live, interpret, remember, and practice theology.

Sometimes this work means explaining why the knowledge of marginalized communities should be heard. At other times, the challenge takes place within academic spaces, where we must insist that knowledge also emerges from the peripheries. Communities that have historically been treated as objects of study are also places where knowledge is created, preserved, and transmitted.

Because of this, I am careful about how often I use the word “decolonial.” It can easily become just another academic label, like decolonial curriculum, decolonial theology, or decolonial pedagogy. But changing our words does not always change our systems. Decolonization is not just about adding new authors to the same tradition. If we change the reading list but the power structures stay the same, then not much has really changed.

So, the real test of decolonial thinking is whether it comes from and works with others. Decolonial theology in Abya Yala must join with Native peoples who have resisted the colonization of their bodies, lands, cultures, and knowledge, and who keep their spiritual practices alive. It must also include the experiences of Afro-descendant peoples, whose histories of enslavement, resistance, and liberation have created their own forms of knowledge and theological reflection.

For me, it always helps to ask a few basic questions: Who is included? Who is heard? Whose knowledge is valued? Who decides? And what kinds of knowledge do our institutions see as legitimate?

For me, thinking otherwise is more than just thinking differently. It means making space for theologians like me, who need to start by naming our ancestral histories and where we come from before sharing our theology. From there, it becomes possible to see why the theology we offer can truly be decolonial.

Maybe decolonial theology always starts with a question: Where does this theologian begin, and who are they learning from?

Only by asking these questions can we start to understand what it means to think otherwise. 

Yenny Delgado

The Unexpected Treasure: God Came to the Margins of Abya Yala

By Eliezer E. Burgos-Rosado 

The story of Nativity is part of our faith’s DNA. We have heard it so many times we risk domesticating it, rendering it inoffensive. Yet when it is viewed from the margins—from the impoverished, racialized, displaced, and forgotten peoples of Abya Yala*. Christmas ceases to be a gentle tale and is revealed for what it truly is: a dangerous disruption, because it destabilizes orders sustained by exclusion; subversive, because it overturns the logics of power and restores dignity to those who have been pushed aside; and profoundly hopeful, because it affirms that God does not abandon suffering peoples, but walks with them.

The Gospel of Luke does not narrate a neutral birth. It situates the event amid an imperial census, a policy of control that displaced bodies and fractured households. Mary and Joseph did not travel out of religious devotion, but under imperial compulsion. In that context of forced mobility and vulnerability, God chose to be born and insert himself into history, taking on its weight.

Here is where the prophetic denunciation begins. While the empire presented itself as the guarantor of the Pax Romana, the true peace of God arrived wrapped in fragility. Augustus called himself the “savior of the world,” yet the true Savior was not born in Rome or in a palace. He was born in Bethlehem, Palestine. Laid in a manger, surrounded by animals and impoverish. For the reason Christmas thus unmasks the lie of the powerful that promise order at the cost of the lives of the poor.

This contrast is no accident. Luke presents a social world in miniature—from the emperor at the top to the infant at the base. In that world, God chooses the most vulnerable body. In an era when infant mortality was extremely high and children possessed no social status, God chose to reveal himself as a baby—not as a strong adult, not as a warrior, nor as a triumphant king. God chooses fragility.

This choice unsettles our image of God and compels us to ask: what if God does not resemble our images of power, but rather those of our shared vulnerability? What if God is not on the side of those who control, but of those who struggle simply to survive?

It is no coincidence that the first to receive the news were shepherds. In their context they were people of low social status, suspect, rural, and despised by urban and imperial culture. They were not “respectable.” Yet to them was entrusted the greatest announcement in history. God not only is born in poverty; God announces his arrival to the poor.

Here the preferential option of God is revealed—not as a theory, but as an embodied praxis. God comes to those who “do not count,” to tell them that they do. God comes to those who have been displaced, to affirm that their stories matter. God comes to those labeled “surplus,” to proclaim that they are bearers of good news.

For this reason, Christmas remains profoundly relevant for Abya Yala. It is not merely a date on the Christian calendar nor an annual pious memory, but a lasting theological key for discerning where and how God continues to come into the world—especially where life is denied or discarded. In territories marked by colonialism, structural inequality, economic violence, racism, and dispossession, the manger still speaks volumes. God continues to come to us: in poverty that is not a choice but a wound; in the abused woman who endures another day; in children who live in hunger and should not bear the consequences of any system that has failed them; in exploited workers; in communities defending their land against voracious capitalists.

The Incarnation tells us something decisive: God claims us by becoming one of us. Not from above, but from within. God knows what pain is because God lived it. God knows what it means to have no place, to depend on others to survive, to be displaced, migrant, and vulnerable.

For this reason, Christian faith cannot be resignation. Christmas calls us to rise with hope. The salvation announced by the angels is not abstract nor merely future. It is concrete, communal, and begins now: where bread is shared, where solidarity is organized, where life is defended, where the lies of empire are exposed.

This is the prophetic call to our communities: you have not been forgotten. The God who was born in a manger continues to walk with you. And just as the shepherds left their routines to see what God was doing, we too are called to move from fear to action, from silence to voice, from a private faith to embodied hope.

Rise up in the name of the One who came before you!

For EMMANUEL is not merely a pious name; it is a spiritual and political proclamation. God is with us and no empire has the final word.

Abya Yala in the Guna language means “land in full maturity and land of vital blood.” In the 1970s, activists, historians, politicians, and theologians with a strong sense of ancestral identity adopted the term Abya Yala as a unified name for the continent, instead of referring to it as Latin America, among other names that perpetuate colonial divisions (Delgado & Ramírez, 2022).

Eliezer E. Burgos-Rosado 

Puerto Rican theologian. Doctoral student in Theology at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. Pastor and graduate of the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico. Works on topics of ethics, ecclesiology, and social justice. Founder of Ediciones Didásko.

Publica

Abya Yala Theology: Prophetic, Communal, and Political

From November 7 to 9, 2025, the inaugural continental gathering was held in Mazatenango, Guatemala. Over the course of three days, delegations from ten countries and 375 participants—including leaders from diverse backgrounds such as farmers, educators, theologians, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, elders, and spiritual guides from across the continent—came together to affirm the foundations of a communal, political, and prophetic theology that denounces colonial oppression and dictatorial political agendas.

This gathering marked a historical event in the emergence of Abya Yala theology. It served as a continental platform to defend life, harmony, Native spiritualities, ancestral knowledge, and the right to exist of the Native/Original Peoples of Abya Yala.

As Christendom has promoted since colonization, as a linear and singular understanding of history, it has increasingly marginalized alternative narratives, diverse spiritualities, and various paths to connect with the divine, wisdom for the native population. This perspective, influenced by government-imposed control, unilateral education programs, and structured religious practices, has perpetuated policies and systems that dictate behavior, belief, and imitation, aiming to mold individuals in its own image. However, this approach is no longer acceptable. Christianity and the teachings of Jesus illuminate a range of practices, as seen in Abya Yala theology, which moves beyond the image of the crucified man to embrace faith in the Resurrection.

In response to this, an embodied spirituality has emerged; the body of the resurrected manifests that another life is possible. A theology that is next to the everyday struggles, in maintaining the memories of those who dedicated their lives to achieving dignity, freedom, and the pursuit of a good living. For prophets of our time who believe in a cycle of times and preach against colonialism and superiority, that the time for native people

‘s Resurrection is now. In this context, we assert that Abya Yala Theology emerges from the heart of God, the resurrected messenger, rooted in faith, hope, and the proclamation of the Resurrection in the lives of those who suffer most since colonization: Indigenous, Natives, and Original peoples of Abya Yala.

Abya Yala’s theological perspective amplifies Quijano’s decolonial perspective on knowledge and power, emphasizing the need to deconstruct power and knowledge systems imposed by European paradigms, which often present themselves as superior and universal. Abya Yala theology is a decolonial theology with holistic ways of theological decoloniality, encompassing three vital dimensions for thinking and feeling God in Abya Yala: feeling, caring, and repairing.

To feel means to be touched, profoundly affected by the struggles of Native/original peoples who inhabit this “land of vital blood,” united through a shared ancestry. Caring embodies love and a commitment to the community, where feelings are genuine and mutual responsibilities foster a sense of cosmoexistence that brings us together. Finally, restoration signifies the movement towards actions that repair broken relationships, restore dignity, provide well-being, and create new conditions for life for all, within the framework of a cyclical and ancestral worldview.

For this reason, Abya Yala theology is inherently political, emphasizing the importance of engaging with spiritualities and ancestral knowledge that enable us to live in community amid the pluridiverse and pluricultural of Natives/Originals peoples. This approach is not the work of isolated theorists; rather, it underscores the urgent need for a theology arising from the peoples themselves as an affirmation of the living God in Abya Yala.

Abya Yala in the Guna language means “land in full maturity and land of vital blood .” In the 1970s, activists, historians, politicians, and theologians with a strong sense of ancestral identity adopted the term Abya Yala as a unified name for the continent, instead of referring to it as Latin America, among other names that perpetuate colonial divisions (Delgado & Ramírez, 2022).

Yenny Delgado