Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes is not one continuous treatise but a collection of ten essays shaped by María Lugones’s years in grassroots organizing, popular education, and feminist philosophy. Its preface asks for a “theoretico-practical” reading: theory should remain answerable to the relations and movements from which it grows. Across the collection, coalition is not a finished agreement among groups that already know who they are. It is a horizon that changes what people can perceive, say, and do together. The essays return to one difficult question from different angles: how can people resist intermeshed oppressions when dominant institutions also shape the selves, choices, and public meanings through which resistance must be expressed?

The first three chapters establish why this question is not solved by simply calling for agency. In “Speaking Face to Face,” Lugones distinguishes racialization from ethnicity and racism from ethnocentrism, then examines how inquiry is distorted when racial and cultural differences are muted. A conversation can appear open while one party’s account of what is happening is treated as unintelligible, or while a white/Anglo inquirer is protected from having her own competence and position questioned. Chapter 2 turns to theories that portray oppression as nearly inescapable. Lugones asks how an oppressed person can form an intention and act when the available choices have already been arranged through another’s power. Her “practical syllogism” names reasoning that ends in action; oppression can redirect that reasoning without making the person a mindless object. The chapter’s account of plural selves and liminal spaces therefore does not make liberation a matter of willpower. It makes room to understand how intentions formed in one social world can expose the constraints of another—and why collective struggle must transform those structures if such intentions are to become livable action.

That argument leads into “world”-travelling, the book’s best-known idea, but Lugones gives it a more demanding meaning than imaginative role-play or the instruction to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes.” People are differently intelligible and able to act in different worlds; the same person may be recognized as a subject in one setting and treated as an instrument in another. Playfulness means approaching another’s world without claiming mastery, attending to how that person understands herself, and allowing one’s own familiar categories to be unsettled. Loving perception is not a sentimental cure for unequal power: it asks for identification without fusion, and recognition without making the other person’s experience a mirror for one’s own. The chapter also warns that being entirely at ease in a world can make travel—and the need to learn from other worlds—less likely. This is a practice of accountable relation, not cultural tourism or a shortcut to knowing another person.

The next essays make clear why relation cannot be reduced to good intentions. “Hard-to-Handle Anger” differentiates anger by its histories, audiences, and possibilities: some anger communicates a judgment of being wronged; some is overwhelmed, becomes difficult to hear, or speaks from a world in which the dominant audience has denied it intelligibility. Lugones does not romanticize every rage as emancipatory, but rejects the demand that only controlled, easily received anger can count as knowledge or political speech. “Purity, Impurity, and Separation” then challenges the fantasy that people and groups can be divided into clean, self-contained units. Its image of “curdling” names a resistant multiplicity that cannot be split into pure components or absorbed into a unified whole. Lugones situates this argument in Latina writing and mestizaje; it should not be lifted out as a universal celebration of hybridity. “Boomerang Perception” follows the colonizing gaze as it shapes relations among people positioned against one another, asking how hostility can travel horizontally when dominant categories and institutions remain unexamined. Together, these chapters make coalition a practice of noticing how power travels through perception, emotion, and the boundaries of belonging.

The collection’s later essays bring that method into specific social geographies. “The Discontinuous Passing…” follows a Latina lesbian subject moving among the barrio, the bar, and the U.S. lesbian movement. Neither a supposedly authentic community nor an exit into a broader movement guarantees freedom: heteronormative nationalism can render her unspeakable at home, while an Anglo-centered lesbian politics can demand that she leave language, place, or cultural difference at the door. The chapter’s bilingual and shifting forms make that movement part of its argument; the labels and scenes belong to a particular historical and political context, not a universal identity map. “Enticements and Dangers of Community and Home” likewise resists choosing between romantic communal belonging and isolated individual freedom. Communities can sustain resistance and also reproduce gendered or other exclusions. “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker” questions the hierarchy that makes detached strategists appear to possess theory while people navigating the street are assigned mere survival tactics. Lugones instead develops “active subjectivity” and tactical-strategic practice: situated acts of meaning-making and companionship can challenge the spaces that institutions organize, while theory itself must remain implicated in those relations. “Streetwalker” is a philosophical figure in this argument, not a label for sex workers or a romantic image of precarious life.

Read together, the essays offer a repertoire rather than a seamless system. Their vocabulary changes, their forms move between analysis, autobiographical reflection, bilingual writing, and political address, and the concepts sometimes remain in tension. That difficulty is part of the work’s method, but it also calls for care: “women of color,” “community,” “world,” and “coalition” do not name internally uniform groups. A reader can begin with Chapters 2–4 to follow agency, plural selves, and world-travelling, then read Chapters 5–7 for anger, impurity, and the colonizing gaze, before turning to Chapters 8–10 for sexuality, community, and street-level political practice. The central feminist contribution is not that difference automatically produces solidarity. It is that solidarity becomes possible through sustained, embodied work to hear resistant meanings, confront how one is implicated in domination, and change the arrangements that make some people’s intentions impossible to enact.

The catalog record is the 2003 Rowman & Littlefield paperback, ISBN 9780742514591; the consulted EPUB identifies the corresponding digital ISBN 9781461640905. See the publisher’s record and contents and the independent journal record for the 1987 “World”-Travelling essay. For a different but complementary form of coalition through plural voices and genres, compare Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras; this is a FemRes reading connection, not a claim that the books are interchangeable.