Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes gathers María Lugones’s philosophical work on coalition across differences that cannot be dissolved into a common identity. Her influential ideas of “world”-travelling, loving perception, and the plural self begin from women of color who inhabit multiple social worlds and are read differently in each. Arrogant perception fixes another person inside the observer’s categories; travelling with playfulness means entering another world without assuming mastery and discovering that neither self nor community is singular.

Lugones connects this relational practice to structures of race, gender, class, coloniality, and heterosexual power. Coalition is not empathy as private feeling, nor a bargain among already complete groups. It is built through resistant companionship, tactical movement, and attention to how oppressed people also misrecognize one another. Her later essays on the colonial/modern gender system show that colonization did not simply impose European sexism on preexisting societies; it reorganized humanity itself through racialized gender categories.

The essays span many years and do not form one linear system. Their difficult philosophical language and shifts in terminology require slow reading, while readers should avoid turning “world”-travelling into cultural tourism detached from material accountability. The collection’s durable value is methodological: solidarity begins not by announcing sameness but by learning how power changes who each of us can be in different worlds, then building action capable of holding plurality without abandoning conflict.