A few weeks ago, Magda and Mercedes returned from Mexico, where they took part in the LATAM Ecosystemic Leadership Program, a gathering that brings together key people —in the most vital and generous sense of the word— from 21 Latin American countries. It’s a space for deep exchange among communities, where learning is shared, mutual support networks are woven, and a regional leadership is strengthened with a shared vision: to build a more vibrant, just, and rooted future.
Something they always carry with them upon return —and this is their third time— is the almost physical sensation participants experience when coming into direct contact with the wide cultural diversity of our continent. In our case, we come from a country like Uruguay, where history bears a silenced genocide, deep colonization, and a wounded identity. For a long time, that false homogeneity went unquestioned in educational spaces: it was part of the curriculum, part of the narrative.
After all, there’s something very evident, very simple: the collective, synchronous encounter between realities —listening, feeling, sharing time and space— moves and transforms. It forces us to rethink what we once took for granted. Diversity, then, is revealed not as an abstract concept or a trendy slogan, but as a tangible truth: a natural, unavoidable fact that runs through us. Being there, with others, opens the body, the mind, and the heart.
Understanding that Latin America’s biodiversity applies to everything living within it opens, from the root, the possibility of re-signifying certain identities.
As a team, we’ve always been shaped by divergent identities, often in conflict with the norm. In one way or another, that has always been part of who we are. But recently, something has become clearer: a deeper awareness of what happens when we reclaim the life impulse —that force that drives us to create, to imagine, to feel that there’s something beyond the mandate to consume, follow instructions, and die, afraid and ashamed.
Understanding that difference is the rule, not the exception, is a valuable sign —a call to share who we are with the deep intention that it means something to others. And for that gesture to become purpose, a driving force: to paint, raise children, teach, learn, write, research, create. If we do it to keep generating life —full, free, interdependent, radiant— then we share a common purpose.
Do you remember the first time you realized that the way you had learned something was just one among many? A cultural construct is precisely that: a social, historical construction, often completely arbitrary.
Realizing that nearly everything we take as “natural” is in fact an agreement —seldom questioned, often designed for the benefit of a few— is a good first step to seeing ourselves with new eyes. To reconnect with creativity and connection.
Opening up to the diverse, the mutable, the chaotic, also means dismantling our certainties. That’s the hard part of this work: it means looking inward and finding more questions than answers. It means understanding the illusion of a single truth, a pre-formatted path. There’s no one right way for anything. And it takes courage to see that.
