Contributions and Contradictions in Decolonizing Community Psychology: Accompanying Mayan and Andean Women Through Feminist PAR

This chapter critically analyzes two community-based feminist participatory action research (FPAR) experiences accompanying Indigenous Maya and Quechua women in the wake of genocidal violence and ongoing impoverishment and heteropatriarchy. As outsider community psychologists educated in the global north, we accompany these women through anti-racist, feminist dialogic relationships. We analyze the participatory praxes developed together to redress challenges impacting their lives (e.g., gender inequality, racism, limited formal education, psychosocial suffering). We discuss our efforts to unlearn or demobilize community psychological theories and EuroAmerican knowledge systems while embracing creative participatory resources gleaned from Freirian pedagogies and feminist and Latin American liberation and critical psychologies to facilitate the centering of Indigenous cultural, intersubjective and sociopolitical ways of knowing-being-doing. We discuss the promise—and the limitations—of mutual accompaniment and dialogical relationality contributing to Indigenous women’s redress of the harms of psychosocial suffering and to the decolonization of racist and patriarchal praxes.