The notion of "internal colonialism" (colonialism interno) in the thought of Pablo Gonzalez Casanova and Rodolfo Stavenhagen

In the last decades, from diverse disciplines, academic currents, networks and also artists and intellectual fashions have intervened in the urgent need to rethink the meaning, scope and consequences of colonization. Unfortunately, the concern is leading to an overabundance of terminology, a cult of novelty, a propensity for essentialism, a lack of knowledge of Latin American academic literature and/or a "deliberate rapacity" in the "appropriation of other people's ideas", avoiding reference explicit to the authors and expanding them, many times, through self-referenced speeches (Pérez Gerardo, 2018: 501-502). In this framework, and giving due credit, we want to recover the notion of "internal colonialism." Our main goal in this paper is to analyze the explanatory potential of the concept of "internal colonialism" for the understanding of domination relationships exercised through the "Four wheels of capitalism: exploitation, dispossession, contempt and repression" (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN). We will focus our attention on the works of two Mexican thinkers who, in continuous dialogue (Bringel and Leone: 2021), inspired, turned into an "analytical concept" (Torres Guillén, 2017: 1) and debated "internal colonialism", shaping this notion as a central reference in studies on colonialism, understood not only as the manifestation of an international conflict, but also intra-national. We are especially interested in observing the concept of "internal colonialism" taking in mind the grievances generated to indigenous communities by the colonial mandate (Tzul Tzul, 2018) and the necessary deconstruction of the ways of understanding damage and reparation, without falling in essentialist approaches. Pablo González Casanova and Rodolfo Stavenhagen are the thinkers who will be studied. In order to approach the concept of "internal colonialism", we will work on a genealogy of both Pablo González Casanova's thought starting with the founding text "Plural society, internal colonialism and development" (1963), passing through Democracy in Mexico (1965) where considers that he systematized the concept, until “Internal Colonialism (a redefinition) (2003); as well as Rodolfo Stavenhagen, from his writing "Classes, colonialism and acculturation" (1963), through his "Seven wrong theses on Latin America" (1965), and to his recent reflection, after five decades, entitled "Seven theses... fifty years later” (2020).