The mind as the last colonized territory

From the plundering of lands to the plundering of subjectivities

Twenty-first-century colonialism no longer needs ships, chains, or cannons. Today, the battle is fought in the invisible realm of the mind. If before the goal was to seize resources, enslave bodies or appropriate territories, now it is about colonizing desires, imaginaries and values.

The colonized person of today no longer wears iron shackles, but shackles of thought. They are convinced that what is foreign is better, that what is their own is backward, that their history is worthless. Thus, the system achieves the deepest form of subjugation: that the dominated aspire to resemble their dominator and despise their own identity.

The Martinian thinker Frantz Fanon expressed it lucidly in Black Skin, White Masks :

“The colonized person is a being in whom an instilled inferiority resides… with every look, every word, he is reminded that his culture is barbaric and that his only way out is to imitate the colonizer.”

Language: Colonization of Thought

Language has never been merely a means of communication. It is the vehicle of collective memory, identity, and thought itself. Imposing a dominant language means shaping how a people understands the world.

Today, over 80% of global scientific and technological output is published in English. This linguistic dominance forces millions of people to think of themselves using foreign categories, to translate their knowledge in order to be recognized, and to abandon their own cultural frameworks.

Latin America knows that wound well. For centuries, Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, Mapuche, or Guarani children were punished for speaking their mother tongue in schools.

The message was brutal and clear: “Your language is backwardness, the master’s is progress.”

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his classic Decolonising the Mind (1986), summarized it thus:

“Linguistic colonization not only steals the voice of the people, it steals their memory and their future.”

The disappearance of indigenous languages was not an accident of time: it was a deliberate strategy of cultural amputation. And where a language dies, a worldview dies with it.

Culture: Broken Mirrors

Mental colonialism feeds on the culture industry.

Film, television, advertising, and music perpetuate an ideal of beauty and success that rarely resembles the face of the colonized. Black or Indigenous skin tones are rendered invisible or caricatured; European features are presented as universal.

As Aimé Césaire wrote in his Discourse on Colonialism :

“A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization. A civilization that uses colonization to justify its existence is morally condemned.”

The result is that millions of people learn to see themselves as "less," aspiring to whiten themselves, to consume foreign symbols, to be accepted into a mold that was never their own.

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Consumption as a form of obedience

Global capitalism doesn't just sell products: it sells identities.

The most expensive cell phone, designer clothes, imported car… these are not mere objects, they are symbols of “status” and “modernity”.

The hidden message is: "If you don't have it, you're worthless; if you don't buy it, you don't exist."

In Mexico, after the signing of NAFTA in 1994, the market was flooded with American products. The traditional diet, based on corn, beans, and vegetables, has been replaced by hamburgers, sodas, and fried foods. Today, the country faces one of the highest obesity rates in the world: more than 70% of the adult population is overweight.

It wasn't just a change in diet: it was a colonization of the body through food.

In Africa, tons of used clothing arrive every week from Europe and the United States. What is considered "trash" in the North becomes a business in the South. But the price is high: small local textile industries are dying, unable to compete with the flood of cheap T-shirts.

Behind every used garment there is a message: "what you have is no good, what we have is what you should wear."

Thus, the colonized person ends up working not to liberate his life, but to buy the symbols of his own dependence.

As Frantz Fanon said:

“The colonized are perpetual consumers of what they do not produce. Their highest aspiration is to possess what belongs to the colonizer.”

The media as invisible colonizers

The most effective colonization is the one that doesn't need a whip.

Television, advertising, and school textbooks become the most efficient instruments of cultural domination.

• Soap operas: they repeat the same script over and over. The white, light-eyed protagonist marries the millionaire. The Indigenous or Black domestic worker is relegated to a secondary role, if not ridiculed. Millions of people learn this way, from childhood, that love, success, and happiness have a specific skin color and social class.

• Advertising: A 2019 UNESCO report revealed that 70% of advertisements in Latin America render ethnic minorities invisible. “Aspirational beauty” remains European: fair skin, straight hair, delicate features. What is our own is erased, what is foreign is exalted.

• Education: In many countries, school textbooks still dedicate entire pages to “European civilization” as a universal model, while relegating Indigenous peoples to footnotes. What should be a source of collective pride becomes a secondary, almost irrelevant past.

  
  

The result is a distorted mirror: colonized peoples see themselves as eternal cultural minors, unable to narrate themselves without asking permission.

The Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire denounced it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed :

“The great task of the oppressor is to convince the oppressed that they are powerless. Once this is achieved, the oppressed no longer need external chains, because they carry oppression within themselves.”

Conclusion

Consumption and the media become the new missionaries of colonization.

They don't force, they seduce. They don't enslave, they convince.

And in that subtlety lies its greatest strength: to make people desire what destroys them, to work for symbols that deny them, to educate their children in admiration for the other and contempt for their own.

Decolonizing the mind, then, means reclaiming the right to name oneself, to feed oneself, to clothe oneself, and to represent oneself with dignity. Only in this way can the last invisible shackle be broken.

Glossary:

Worldview — The holistic way in which a culture interprets the universe, time, and life. The author emphasizes that the death of an indigenous language is not only a linguistic loss, but the disappearance of an entire, unique way of seeing reality.

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) — Acronym for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA in Spanish). A trade agreement signed in 1994 that, according to the text, opened the door to the food and cultural colonization of Mexico by the United States.

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. International organization cited in the text to support, through data, the invisibility of ethnic minorities in Latin American advertising.

Quechua, Aymara, Nahua, Mapuche, Guarani — Main indigenous peoples of Latin America. The Quechua and Aymara are located primarily in the Andean region; the Nahua in central Mexico; the Mapuche in territories of Chile and Argentina; and the Guarani in Paraguay and its bordering areas.

Subjectivities — The set of perceptions, judgments, desires, and ways of feeling that make up a person's inner world. In the context of this article, it refers to the psychological territory that neocolonialism seeks to conquer in order to shape the individual's identity from within.

Imaginaries — Collective representations (images, myths, values) that a society constructs to understand itself. The text denounces how local imaginaries are supplanted by foreign ideals of success and beauty.