Latin American ecolinguistics: deconstructing discourse studies, coloniality and industrial environmentalism

: Latin American universities have a strong tradition in discourse studies. Beginning in the sixties, local discourse analysis approaches introduced a critical turn that started in linguistics and semiotics and crossed social sciences establishing a new critical perspective. Ecolinguistics and environmental studies, on the other hand, present a di ﬀ erent case. As a theoretical approach, ecolinguistics has found a hard time establishing itself as an autonomous discipline in the universities of the region, struggling with the tradition built by discourse studies. This article aims to analyse the development of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and ecolinguistics in Latin America to present a possible explanation of the di ﬃ culties ecolinguists have found in the region to introduce their scope in formal academic institutions and why critical discourse analysis (CDA) have remained far from the eco-perspectives in South America. We argue that Latin American CDA still maintains a Eurocentric vision while environmental perspectives remain loyal to the anthropocentrism and industrial fatalism posed by the dominant discourses. We believe that if issues approached keep an anthropocentric perspective while theoretical frames present a Eurocentric thinking, ecolinguistics, along with critical animal studies (CAS) and gender studies, may present an alternative to human-nonhuman-nature relations.


Critical perspectives in Latin America
Discourse studies have a strong tradition and history in Latin American universities.Beginning in the sixties, discourse analysis approaches, even before critical discourse analysis (CDA) was born, introduced a critical turn from linguistics and semiotics that crossed social sciences and established a new perspective (Emilsson 2008;Harvey 2012;Pessoa de Barros 2012).Ecolinguistics and environmental studies, on the other hand, pose a different approach in academic fields, not very developed in the region.As a new theoretical vision, it was introduced by Brazilian researchers around 1998 and since then it has been mostly related toand in some cases overshadowed by -CDA, sociolinguistics and glottopolitics.Perhaps for this reason ecolinguistics have had a hard time establishing it as an autonomous discipline in the universities and academic institutions in the region.Nevertheless, environmental studies have been adopted as a research object in the last years by disciplines other than ecolinguistics, linguistics and discourse studies (Greco and Crespo 2015;Svampa and Viale 2020).Some of them have formed what has been called "Latin American Environmental Thought" (PAL, by initials in Spanish: Pensamiento Ambiental Latinoamericano).
In this work, we aim to analyse the development of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and ecolinguistics in Latin America presenting a possible explanation about the difficulties ecolinguists in the region have found in introducing their discipline in formal academic institutions and why CDA have remained far from the ecoperspectives in South America.
We argue that Latin American CDA holds, on the one hand, a Eurocentric theoretical perspective that allows questioning corpora but not the framework; and, on the other hand, an anthropocentrism blended with industrial fatalism (Anshelm and Hultman 2015), presenting in those corpora, that refrains from deconstructing human dominance over other species.Finally, we assert that the introduction of ecolinguistics would allow the breaking of both the Eurocentric and Anthropocentric structures by building a transversal perspective in discourse studies in the way gender and critical animal studies have done.
2 Latin American critical studies

Discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis
According to Arnoux (2021: 714), the critical positioning of the researchers was manifested early: at the end of the sixties South American universities began to consider semiotic perspectives on popular culture and the basic elements of discourse analysis made their appearance.Even before CDA was born as a critical perspective and community of researchers, the region developed a solid tradition analysing the construction of meaning in the media adopting different theoretical frameworks.In Mexico, the Center for Linguistic and Literary Studies of the College of Mexico (Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios del Colegio de México), offered in 1976 a Ph.D. course in which a critical revision of Greimas' semiotic theory was presented (Broden 2021).In 1973, in Argentina, Luis Prieto became chairman of the Linguistics and Semiotics course at the University of Buenos Aires and introduced discourse analysis theories in Argentine universities as a critical perspective.In Brazil, the inclusion of Michel Pêcheux's materialist discourse analysis, in 1979, meant the institutionalization of discourse studies in the University of Campinas (Arnoux 2021: 714).
During the last twenty years, CDA has achieved a central role among Latin American discursive approaches, providing a great number of researchers as well as topics for research.Regarding recent developments and the current identity of the Latin American discourse studies, Arnoux (2021: 713) points out that: Discourse Analysis has reached a great level of development and a particular profile in Latin America motivated by the history of the continent, the positioning of researchers and the strong presence of language sciences in its academic and educational institutions.Its specificity, beyond national traditions, is based on the scope of the works, on the strength and continuity of the organizations that bind them together, on many of the networks that are formed and on the shared tasks.In this sense, Adriana Bolivar, when inaugurating the ALED [Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso] Channel, on August 14, 2020, pointed out that the path we walked allows "talking about an analysis of the Latin American discourse".In the same way, when referring to Discursive Semiotics, Barros (2012) already stated that "semiotic studies in South America are no longer peripheral but, on the contrary, part of a Semiotics in capital letters".(Arnoux 2021: 713, author's translation) Following European authors, CDA in the region developed as a deconstruction of the abuse in power relationsamong humansmanifested through discourse and their social implicances.According to Wodak, CDA was born from sociolinguistics due to the lack of interest in sociolinguistics in the structuration of social hierarchies through language.Therefore, CDA and Critical Linguistics (Fowler et al. 1979;Hodge and Kress 1993) presented a social theory of language and its functioning in ideological processes adopting a linguistic methodology (Mendizabal 2018: 18).But, as Stibbe points out, most of this work on language and power focuses on the role of discourse in oppression and exploitation.For example, the journal Discourse & Society is dedicated to "power, dominance and inequality and to the role of discourse in their legitimization and reproduction in society, for instance in the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, class or world religion" (Stibbe 2001: 146).Rare exceptionsas Kheel's (1995) discussion of the discourse of huntingmention the role of discourse in the domination of other species by humans.Power is described as a relation between humans only.According to Fairclough (1992: 64), "language contributes to the domination of some people by others".Following Stibbe (2001), one of the main reasons that animals are excluded from discussions of language and power is that they are not, themselves, participants in their own social construction through language.Stibbe asserts that because of the Marxist roots of CDA, analysis focuses on hegemony, where oppression of a group is carried out ideologically, rather than coercively, through the manufacture of consent (Fairclough 1992).In animals, the power is completely coercive, carried out by people who use animals.They do not consent to their treatment because of "false consciousness" generated through ideological assumptions contained in discourse.But this coercive power used to oppress animals depends on the consent of a majority of the human population who, buying animal products, explicitly or implicitly agrees to the way animals are treated.Therefore, it is in the manufacturing of this consent that language plays a central role (Stibbe 2001: 146).
Nature, on the other hand, unlike nonhuman animals, has entered as a topic in CDS due to the relevance gained by the climate crisis and its consequences on human population (Lamb et al. 2020).Focusing on the negative social effects of climate change, nature has become a subject as long as phenomena have an impact on the human way of life.Political discourse also has adopted the subject due to its social importance and, consequently, nature has become a subtopic in social struggle issues; a new context for social conflict.And this is the way CDA adopts it: not as ecological emergence but as the trigger in social conflict.
This situation is not exclusive to the studies in central countries.European perspectives not only introduced Eurocentric theories but European prejudices as well.In search of a local identity, Latin American discursive studies have focused on local conflicts, such as inequality, racism, gender discrimination, etc.As van Dijk (1999: 24) states, CDA researchers usually adopt the side of the oppressed.Analyses tend to evidence how that oppression is constructed through discourse and, in some cases, highlight a way out of that oppression.Thus, many Latin American studies call for a focus on native South Americans rights and identities, their native tongues, discourses, and social practices as a way to decolonize and modernize Latin American CDA, in many cases romanticizing these identities (Guerrero Arias 2010;Medizabal 2018;Rivera 2015).
Considering historical aspects, there is a major issue in the development of thought in the region: the independence movements that led to the creation of the modern national states remained, in several ways, part of the life in the continent in the form of a mandate for emancipatory thought, questioning the hegemonic knowledge by confronting it with the local context, which leads to a significant degree of autonomy (Arnoux 2021: 713).We can find traces of this emancipatory thought nowadays in the work of most local critical analysts: Viviane Resende's book, Decolonizar os estudos críticos do discurso 'Decolonizing critical discourse studies' (2019) inquires about the colonial matrix and adopts a militant gesture of resistance.It must be noted that her militant gesture asserts the existence of a colonial identity in the local discourse studies.
Latin American countries developed their history by looking at Europe (Forte 2019).Their culture, languages, and traditions were mostly rooted in European traditions with local features.Therefore, it was somehow expected that their academic traditions were founded on European models too.In this sense, works like Resende's are an example of the deconstruction of colonial models in the Global South and the critical intellectual perspective in a region marked by a turbulent recent history.The difficulties of constructing democracy, expressed in coups d'état, political violence, and military dictatorships, led to intense questioning about the situation of peripheral countries, agency of the centres of power, the marked and progressive subalternation of the popular sectors, and the situation of socially minoritized groups.In all cases, the idea of a common destiny and a true and radical democracy sustained the analytical inquiry (Arnoux 2021: 713-714).
However, this complex context favoured the questioning of discourses before questioning theories about discourse.A social necessity for deconstructing ideologies in certain discoursesmostly right winged and fascist discoursesseems to have prioritized an ideology analysis over a deconstruction of the theoretical tool, which are constructed from a certain ideological point of view too (Varsavsky 1969: 6).Social topics became the issue at hand while European and American theories about language and discourse remained almost untouched.This is the reason why both the types of discourse and the topics addressed must be considered in detail.South American critical discourse analysts have approached a wide range of discourses: from political discourse, journalistic, psychiatric, pedagogic, academic, cinematographic, marketing, and religious and legal discourses (Mendizabal 2018: 22).On the other hand, according to Arnoux (2021: 718), topics addressed have been always related to prejudices and social inequalities: racism, classism, violence towards women and the LGTBIQ collective, migrants and minoritized groups, fake news, communication control and environmental issues.
Regarding environmental issues, Arnoux's claim seems to be not entirely accurate.Environmental discourses and animal rights have rarely been the object of CDA in the region, although they constitute a critical tradition in themselves.We will approach this topic in the following sections.Regarding theoretical frameworks, the three main theoretical perspectives that influenced Latin American research, according to Bürki and García Agüero (2019), are French School of Discourse Analysis (Althusser 1970;Charaudeau 1983Charaudeau , 2005;;Maingueneau 1999Maingueneau , 2014;;Pecheux 1969), Systemic functional discourse perspectives (Fowler et al. 1979;Hodge and Kress 1993;Kress 2003;van Leeuwen 2008) and North American cognitive research on language (Lakoff 1996(Lakoff , 2010)).

Ecolinguistics
As we pointed out, several groups are currently working in the region.The most important of them is the Brazilian Ecosystemic Linguistics also known as the Brazilian School of Ecolinguistics (Couto et al. 2016), which is a well-established and important branch in ecolinguistics with presence in some of the most important universities of Brazil.Hildo do Couto in an interview made by Elza Kioko Nakayama Nenoki do Couto (2013: 78) describes how it was conformed: In 2010, Davi Borges de Albuquerque, who had already been investigating the linguistic situation in East Timor, joined the UnB in linguistics.The previous year, Elza Kioko had started a postdoctoral study with me, dealing with the language of the gypsies of Aparecida de Goiânia from an ecolinguistic perspective.All this, added to the various disciplines I taught at the university, gave a start to the emergence of what came to be called the Ecolinguistic School of Brasilia.In early July 2012, we had the 1st Brazilian Ecolinguistics Meeting at the University of Brasília.The fact is that we currently have members in other institutions, such as USP, UFRJ, UFG, UEG and the State University of Roraima, among countless others.Well, the variety of ecolinguistics that this group centred on UnB practices was called ecosystem linguistics.(Elza Kioko Nakayama Nenoki do Couto 2013: 78, author's translation) Another important active group is located at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Cochabamba, in Bolivia (Arratia Jimenez 2019) and a smaller one at the University of Córdoba (Ballesteros 2009;Ballesteros et al. 2015), in Argentina.There are also a few individual researchers spread through the South American area (Bondarenko Pisemskaya 2010; Forte 2020).Some of these perspectives are close to CDA: critical analysis of human relations with the ecosystem and nonhuman animals manifested through discourse in the way Stibbe's (2015) analysis.Brazilian Ecosystemic Linguistics focuses its interest on the biologic, idealogical, and sociologic aspects of language, following Odense Dialectic Linguistics (Bang and Døør 2007) considering language as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.
In all, Latin American ecolinguistics is still a developing field.Although the Brazilian School constitutes a big and well-established academic community, many South American universities still consider ecolinguistics as a new and almost unknown branch of linguistic studies and, therefore, CDA and glottopolitics absorb most of the work done in the fields of eco-critical discourses, animal rights discursive perspectives, ecology of languages and surrounding fields and ecolinguistics is neither included in the curricula nor in the study contents.

Environmental studies and PAL
Outside discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, approaches coming from different branches of social sciences have ventured into the climate crisis subject.Many of the researchers come from fields such as sociology, political sciences, and surrounding fields.And in many cases, they form committees that work and assist the development of public policies about sustainable practices (Sánchez-Calderón and Blanc 2019).These approaches focus on the different dynamics established by central and peripheral countries for industrial development.
In Latin America, industrial practices are linked to practices like the so-called neo-extractivism and agriculture.This kind of approach focuses on a situation analysis: The massive agrifood model […] presents a huge impact on our health and the lives of animals, plants and fields.It's a model constructed by big international companies […] Agribusiness model is responsible for the main socio-environmental trouble of Argentina, our potential Chernobyl.(Svampa and Viale 2020: 65, 72, author's translation) This perspective, the 'situation analysis', grants the researchers a comfortable place to deconstruct the role played by other disciplines approaching the field: In our country [Argentina] the social and human sciences, with few exceptions, continue to turn their backs on these issues.There are many who still defend a limited and partial approach to the "environmental issue", more linked to the hegemonic perspective than to the holistic issues and regional languages of assessment that have emerged in recent decades in the heat of struggles.Even in progressive sectors a kind of indifference seems to have settled, if not intellectual laziness, very functional to the crisis, which on the one hand tends to accept the questioning and criticism of current development models, but on the other, without mediation or solid arguments, maintains and repeats like a mantra that the problem is that "there are no other alternatives".(Svampa and Viale 2020: 13, author's translation) As Svampa and Viale (2020) mentioned, most of these Latin American social approaches to the climate crisis adopt an environmentalist perspective.
It is not only human life that is in danger, but also that of other species and the Earth system as a whole.The Anthropocene begins a stage marked by the narratives of the end.Thus, it is not surprising that there is a profuse bibliography on the collapse of human civilization, since there are not a few specialists who postulate that ecocidewhat we call here "terricide"is the greatest threat that threatens world society and life on the planet.If we add to this the equally fearsome hypotheses of a global war and a pandemic, we are faced with factors that, far from being mutually exclusive, can strengthen each other until they coincide in a combinatory process for humanity.(Svampa and Viale 2020: 15, author's translation) On the other hand, we also find the group called Latin American Environmental Thinking or PAL, Pensamiento Ambiental Latinoamericano, in its original Spanish.Also born from political sciences and sociology fields, PAL has developed as a political construction of correctness to talk about the climate crisis.Corbetta et al. (2015: 317) present their approach as a multidisciplinary vision: We believe that the necessary bases to dismantle the unique and linear thinking that the hegemonic and Eurocentric development model has built lies in a Latin American education with relational and territorialized capacity, conceived in an integrative and plural sense; an environmental education supported by a conceptual matrix whose structuring axes are interdisciplinarity, the thematic transversality of environmental issues, the dialogue of knowledge, and environmental ethics, in order to assume the challenge of a new civilizing ethos.(Corbetta et al. 2015: 317, author's translation) One of the key concepts that PAL share with ecocritical perspectives is that climate crisisthey call it "environmental crisis"is a civilizational one, related to an economic, technological, and cultural model.PAL focuses on the colonialist aspects that subaltern human groups (South American natives, the poor, women, African origin people, and the Southern hemisphere) suffer during the exploitation of environmental resources in a globalization process (Corbetta et al. 2015: 317).The solution posed by PAL lies in a vision of sustainability based on the relationship that indigenous-peasant societies maintain with their environment.This perspective roots the notion of sustainability in the cultural knowledge about the biological wealth of the region (Corbetta et al. 2015: 319).
3 Coloniality, industrial environmentalism, and critical studies In the above paragraphs, we have described Latin American CDA as a colonial approach to CDS and anthropocentrism as a main feature of the environmental studies.As we mentioned, most CDA approaches in Latin America follow French, English, and American theories (Bürki and García Agüero 2019).Resende (2019: 19) describes the situation as follows: Despite an already consolidated tradition of discursive studies in Latin America, with a prominent position in postgraduate programs in the area of 'Literature and Linguistics' and a pulsating calendar of annual events in the area, it can be said that there is a lot of application of the imported knowledge and little local theoretical or methodological creativity.Discourse studies in Brazil are basically divided into two major lines: French discourse analysis and English discourse analysis.Only the names by which we know these strands of discursive studies already tell us about the coloniality of the field.This coloniality of discourse knowledge, more immediately, means a great effort to apply theories considered universally valid and little modified in the situated context, but it also has implications for being a discourse analyst in this place of subalternity in the academic fieldthis space that Latin American discourse researchers occupy in relation to our peers from the Global Northand on the power to think of theoretical alternatives.(Resende 2019: 19, author's translation) The strong discursive tradition mentioned by Arnoux is based on foreign traditions, European and American visions about language and discourse.French (authors from Althousser, Pecheux to more current theorists like Charaudeau or Maingueneau) and English schools (Fairclough, Halliday, Kress, van Leuween) have been dominant in the region.With the cognitive turn posed by framing theories (Lakoff 1996(Lakoff , 2010;;Lakoff and Johnson 1984), US cognitive theories have also entered discursive approaches (although not yet a dominant but disputing a place among foreign theories).
A few local authors have presented original elaborations, alternate visions, or reelaborations to these theories -Flax (2019), Martínez Romagosa and Flax (2020), and Raiter (2003), are some examples of itbut the majority of the work developed in the region is related to corpus linguistics: European or American theories and methodology used on a selected local corpora (Berardi 2003).Most of the research involves making inventories of discursive strategies and semiotic resources that construct a certain ideology, position, role or type of discoursethis is explicit in the last conferences of the Latin American Discourse Studies Association (ALED by its initials in Spanish: Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso) and its journal, RALED (Revista de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso)but without building a new approach or perspective on language and discourse.
On the other hand, dominant discourses about the climate crisis in Latin Americaas in most of the Western worldsupport the idea of an industrial environmentalism (industrial fatalism or plain environmentalism, as opposed to eco-perspectives).According to Martínez Castillo (2015), environmentalism rationalizes human dominion over nature and other species and supposes a resolution of problems from a capitalist perspective, that is to say, without attending to social problems involved and operating at the local level.This is what Anshelm and Hultman (2015) describe as industrial fatalism: opposing to ecological perspectives that deconstruct neo-liberal economics and demand a social, political, and industrial transformation at the global level (Martínez Castillo 2015: 2-4), industrial fatalism conceives industrial development as fully compatible with sustainable procedures.Based on the idea that industrial growth necessarily entails scientific development, this vision states that the climate crisis will be solved by the same principles that brought us to this situation.Therefore, it is not necessary to rethink our place as species but to look for a solution in the science fuelled by the industry (Anshelm and Hultman 2015: 19).This perspectiveand not only in Latin Americais supported by the false idea that Western science is objective and universal.It is needless to say that this conception involves a definition of science that deals only with the facts about reality as unquestioned reality, independent of local evaluative processes.The problem is that when this feature is extended to the use of science in the public sphere of decision-making, objectivism becomes positivism (Greco and Crespo 2015: 37).
In Latin America, industrial environmentalism/Industrial Fatalism is combined with the decolonial movement mentioned by Arnoux.As an example of this situation, we can consider Argentina's presidential speech about climate change in 2022.On November 1, Argentine President, Alberto Fernández, in his presentation of the National Plan for Adaptation and Mitigation of Climate Change to 2030 (Plan Nacional de Adaptación y Mitigación al Cambio Climático al 2030) asserted that: What is Latin America's fault when many areas become desertified and what used to be productive ceased to be so, and what is Africa's fault in suffering what it suffers?We really have to deal with climate change and solve all the damage that was generated by the ambition of the powerful, whose only worries are to keep their winnings in a circle at any cost, and the deniers, who said that climate change does not exist and continue to subject the world to more poisoning.(Argentina.gob.ar2022: 4, author's translation) Although not explicitly mentioned, Fernández refers to central countries as the ones to blame for the climate crisis.Later in his speech mentions that Latin America is not responsible for the climate crisis but suffers the effects of the industrialization of central countries, bypassing international evidence signalling countries like Argentina as main contaminants due to its agrifood production model (FAO).
Latin American discourse studies adopt this kind of vision -CDA and sociological perspectives as wellstarting from an anthropocentric view of the issue, this is, considering only situations that can be harmful to humans, supporting their hegemony over other species and excluding perspectives that treat humans as a part of an ecosystem.This is the streaming of thought in which Latin American environmental thinking is inserted: the critic proposed seems to agree with political correctness in terms of social context and development perspectives.They are concerned, in the first place, with economic development in order to combat inequality in the region.But to propose economic growth at the expense of a climate crisis is not politically acceptable, therefore, the social factor is introduced: the respect for native South American people as the metaphor of the origin, a romantic vision, almost as a kind of 'good savage'.This allows for avoiding ecological approaches (anti-speciesists) capable of deconstructing anthropocentrism and environmental industrialism.The metaphor of the good savage drives the questioning away from anthropocentrism, speciesism, and industrial environmentalism to focus on colonialist practices over the Global South.In this sense, it focuses only on questioning colonialist power and practices over the means of production claiming, in any case, for a change of hands: power to the people without change in the structures.
The few CDA research done in the region regarding climate change rarely disputes the frame "nature as a resource", because they keep an anthropocentric, speciesist, and industrial perspective.Their Marxist perspective allows Latin American researchers to critique the ownership and dominion over the resources but not the constitution of these resources (Velázquez Gutiérrez 2014).This way, the discussion becomes an argument about the power of the North over the South, white over indigenous, rich over poor but rarely human over nonhuman.At this point we can presume that the history of social struggle in the region forced critical theorists to focus on human inequalities and, when nonhuman inequalities conflict with them, they are put aside.This constitutes an important problem when it comes to ecocritical perspectives because it means human hegemony prevails.In a similar way, ideas coming from the North that conflict with human inequalities in the South are associated with the colonialism posed by Northern countries over the Southern and considered imperialistic, therefore, also discarded by the politically progressive sectors.This is a key factor for ecolinguistics and the issue we are discussing.In countries like Argentina, where farmed animals are a registered trademark, farm work is related to the lower working class.If nonhuman animals are, we may say following ecolinguistics, living sentient beings able to feel pain and suffering and the way we raise them a treat them threatens the ecosystem, then the activity that sustains the survival of the working class is wrong.And if it is wrong it must be changed.Only this change involves a deep re-structuration of our productive system.
Here is where humans prevail: the limit of this deconstruction is human working classes.As we can see in the discussions posed by Velázquez Gutierrez (2014) and Svampa and Viale (2020), once the argument reaches the animal question the focus detours to the impact of these activities on the working class and how this is so because of the power of the North over the South in the struggle for resources but not the constitution of the category of resources in terms of Stibbe (2015).
When we talk about resources we can say that there are people that have them and people that do not have them.If we deconstruct the concept of resource transversal categories can be found: ecology and our relationship with other species forces a re-elaboration of the Marxian concept of social class (Forte 2020) and this is what Latin American CDA is not able to do.Most of the authors above mentioned call for a decolonizing perspective in CDS that serves to evidence the logical relations behind the social construction of power in the region while they apply colonialist perspectives to their social realities but cannot reach an interspecies level.
Nevertheless, some works seem to address the anthropocentrism that structures the environmental thought (Guerrero 2016;Pérez-Marín 2016) even if they also centre their arguments on the colonialism exercised by the central countries over the Global South instead of considering transversal perspectives.Their analysis cannot avoid either category such as environmental administration and nature-as-resource since they are deeply rooted in the industrial discourse.Although it is undeniable the different roles played by central and peripheral countries in the climate crisis, the latter usually develop the same kind of unsustainable practicesindustrial, agricultural, socialand similar measures to contain the effects of these practices, either requested by the central countries or on their own initiative in search of their own development.

Out of the woods
In light of what we have described so far, neither anthropocentrism nor colonial identity is locally manufactured.Nonetheless, both come together: the region inherited a European culture based on an anthropocentric view of the world.Colonial theoretical perspectives come from colonial identities but they can be used to deconstruct these identities.So, with highs and lows, Latin American colonial identities are currently subject to questioning and analysis.Some countries have proven to be more successful than others in this matter.Bolivia has achieved a major change in its national identity by recognizing itself as a "plurinational" state, embracing its European heritage in parity with the many native nations that populate the country (Forte 2021: 4).This change has not yet reached CDA analysts as a change in topics: "plurinational" discourses have been well received but just in terms of social change.Nature representations belonging to native nations have not yet entered the common sense of the European heritage population and, therefore, analysts are still using European categories to think about Bolivian realities.This is what allows activities such as opencast mining to be considered as a viable activity in terms of job positions and their relation to social conflict.
However, there have been some approaches that focus on social conflict while they tend to signal a different origin for some of the issues.The anthropocentric vision has been deconstructed in Latin America by two branches of critical studies, at different times and with different degrees of success: feminism and gender studies and critical animal studies.

Gender studies
During the second decade of the XXI Century, the rising political activity developed by a new generation of activists led to a big expansion in the scope of gender studies not only in Europe and the United States but also in other regions of the world such as Latin America, with the movement Ni una menos (Molyneux et al. 2021: 4).Although priorities and practice present important differences within feminism, these differences have helped refine scope and establishing alliances.Theoretical approaches of Latin American feminist movement had already made insinuations since the 1970s, even though only reached academic visibility in the 1980s (Lux and Pérez 2020: 5).
The gender movement has succeeded not only in questioning the traditional ways of doing politics and contesting power, but has also promoted a profound epistemological innovation in the field of scientific paradigms, since they have constituted in an instance of epistemological surveillance of scientific discourses about humans and their social context (Aguayo and Nascimento 2016;Ali 1995).Academic gender studies in Latin America cover a range of objects and disciplinary fields, denoting a wealth of intellectual production.They also show a diversity of currents most of them counter-hegemonic (Breilh 2001: 2).Regarding the issue of mainstream gender studies at the university, two tendencies were expressed in these programs: the first sought to penetrate all academic programs while the second tried to strengthen an independent perspective that could train professionals capable of developing research and public politics (Viveros Vigoya 2017).
But the main contribution gender studies have made to modern critical theory is the unit to measure most prejudices: white Christian European heterosexual male (Adams 2015).Of course, misogyny and hate towards women and the LGTBIQ collective are not exclusive to Europe or white Christian countries; but since European culture has managed to currently dominate a big portion of the planet most discourses of hate have their roots in that heritage.Regarding Latin America, feminism and gender studies have developed in areas such as gender and coloniality (Lugones 2007;Sánchez 2005;Segato 2010), social class (Bermúdez 1992), history (Bassanezi Pinsky 2009;Borja 1996), etc.Nevertheless, all topics approach the place of women in society and its impact socially and psychologically.

Critical animal studies (CAS)
As gender studies, critical animal studies arose from the protest.First, there was a social demand and after a discipline to study it.Animal rights and animal liberation movements had a late start in Latin America: most NGO's and shelters began their activities and the end of the nineties and the connection among them was not very good (Méndez 2020: 50).Critical animal studies did not were systematized in the region until the establishment of the local branch of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), the Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Críticos Animales (ILECA, 'Latin American Institute of Critical Animal Studies') in 2011 (Nocella et al. 2014).The ILECA, gained strength around 2013, with a sudden rise in its number of members and at the moment includes researchers from countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia that had previously been working independently or as part of other organizations.

Latin American ecolinguistics
Coming from fields such as philosophy, political science, cultural studies, and communication, CAS researchers have an interdisciplinarity and decolonial perspective (Ávila Gaitán 2017: 346).In a similar way to gender studies, critical animal studies introduce a rupture in dominant critical studies questioning the historical centrality of human masculinity (Adams 2015).Besides, the peripheral condition of its researchers grants them their decolonial perspective due to the anticolonialist tradition in which local CDA has its roots.This decolonial perspective, provided by the local tradition of critical studies, enables a certain mistrust towards discursive categories that allows a political reading of the discursive constructions (political in the sense of social change possibilities).We can see here how what constitutes a problem for CDA researchers seems to be some kind of advantage for CAS.Most works from ILECA and its Journal, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Críticos Animales (RLECA), present a variety of theoretical approaches to deconstruct the place of specisism in marketing (Benítez 2022), food industry (Bórquez 2022;Varela Trejo and Vargas García 2022), industrial exploitation (Liebsch 2022).Therefore, ILECA studies are not just deconstructing speciesism and anthropocentrism but colonialism as well, introducing, along with Gender Studies, a call for intersectionality.
So, colonialism seems to be an issue that crosses many theoretical perspectives; especially in places such as Latin America, where colonialist practices have been ingrained in several ways.Critical discourse analysts seem to identify colonial discursive practices; though they acceptone way or the othercolonial theories.
On the other hand, environmental perspectives are just a capitalist position in disguise that never achieves an ecocritical stage.So, a consistent critical approach, we claim, must follow the road paved by gender and critical animal studies.This is the path ecolinguistics has taken.Nevertheless, two issues seem to need an a priori definition for a renewed perspective: Transdisciplinarity: different theoretical approaches to language and the multimodal construction of meaning must be considered not just as tools but as a development of the local identity.It is not enough to analyse local corpora when the vision applied to them is a colonial one.Multiple perspectives help in confronting the colonial issue on multiple sides.Latin American CDA introduces itself as a transdisciplinary perspective but most of their works are focused on text descriptions without interpretations or explanations adopting theoretical tools from other disciplines (Martinez Romagosa and Flax 2020: 56).

Forte
Transversality: confronting theories is also a part of the solution.By addressing a transversal topic, participation from various sectors can be achieved.As gender studies and critical animal studies evidence, the issue at hand may be the same for different theories and approaches.As we have pointed out in previous works, Hribal (2007: 101) argues that animals are part of the working class because they have been the workforce behind human labour, an exploited voiceless workforce.It can be thought that nonhuman animals are found in conditions similar to those of women of African origin in European cultural communities: doubly exploited; first because of their status as women, then because of their status as African or Afro-descendants.Animals are exploited only for their condition of such, although they are exploited both by the bosses and by the workers with whom they share (although not so much) tasks.In this way, a key factor is evident: Western speciesist discourse is no different from misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic discourses, etc. Oppressors remain the same: white, western, Christian, and heterosexual men (Forte 2020: 13).It goes without saying that these characteristics are inherent to Western hegemonic discourse, regardless of the geographies that it may reach due to its circulation.All these prejudices and forms of violence are a constitutive part of the system.Therefore, joining forces is not just a winning strategy by a new elaborated ideology to pose a new construction of the world we live in.
This is where ecolinguistics can show its strength and the experience gained through the path it has already walked: several language approaches on key issues deconstructing human and nonhuman relations (Navarro 2019), econarratives that point to androcentric and decolonial roles (Eslava-Bejarano 2021; Teixeira de Carvailo 2021), etc. Ecolinguistics has already joined forces with gender and critical animal studies, even making an important contribution to CDA.Therefore, ecolinguistics has accomplished what CDA couldn't in Latin America, even if it was on a smaller scale.An alliance between CDA and ecolinguistics can favour reaching a wider scope and perspective, not only theoretically but practically, transforming discourses, social practices, and power relations.