A World That Refuses to End: Reading Yecid Ortega's Pluriversal Applied Linguistics as a Justice Act

Resumen

There is a photograph early in this book of the entrance to a school in the southwest of Bogotá. It is 6:00 in the morning. Parents arrive on foot, on bicycles, by car. Teachers stand at the gate shaking hands with children whose homes, beyond those walls, are places where windows must be barred for security and where rooms feel, as students themselves describe, like prisons. The school is a sanctuary. The book itself is an argument — built over 242 pages, across five chapters, through eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, through theory drawn from fishermen and vice-presidents and Bolivian intellectuals and Andean cosmologies — that what happens inside that gate matters not only for Colombia, but for the entire discipline of applied linguistics.

It is an ambitious claim, and arguably one that the book does not fully sustain. But what distinguishes Pluriversal Applied Linguistics from much of the decolonial critique that has proliferated in language education in recent years (see, e.g., Macedo, 2019; López-Gopar, 2016; Guerrero Nieto et al., 2022) is that Ortega does not stop at the diagnosis. He proposes a framework, grounds it in lived research, and builds its conceptual architecture in dialogue with teachers and students whose voices, in most applied linguistics scholarship, tend to appear only as data. Whether that architecture is fully transferable beyond the specific context of Bogotá is a question the book leaves open — perhaps inevitably.