ABSTRACT
The existing multilingual/multimodal practices in Latin America and the Caribbean prior to the European invasions were deeply influenced by the imposition of European epistemology, ontology, and languages. In Latin American countries, coloniality remains and has been propagated through institutions such as schools. Outside these institutions, Indigenous and Afro descendants have found ways to resist coloniality by (re)creating multilingual and multimodal practices and by asserting their place in the world; in other words, they have engaged in decolonial practices. Hence, the purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the multimodal, multilingual, and decolonial practices outside formal institutions of these minoritized groups and their connections to issues of land recognition, citizenship, gender, blackness, and ethnicity, among other sociocultural factors. This chapter showcases the multilingual/multimodal texts created by different Indigenous and Afro-Latin American artists in Latin America and the Caribbean, as presented both in academic publications and in the general media. In this chapter, the analysis and discussion of these artistic practices are organized according to three themes: literary creations, musical compositions and theatrical performances. It is concluded that these artistic texts reveal minoritized peoples’ linguistic creativity and their own ways of decolonizing multilingualism.
