The participation of indigenous women in the Ecuadorian protests of 2025 strongly reconfigured the relationships between body, time, and territory. Their presence in the streets was not only political: it directly questioned who had the right to imagine and occupy the future. From an ethnographic, decolonial, and situational perspective, this session proposes understanding protest not as an isolated moment, but as a way of inhabiting time: a dispute against state narratives that promise ‘progress’ while deciding who belongs to the present and who remains trapped in the past.

The bodies of indigenous women, traversed by collective memory and historical violence, become territories of resistance and creation of the future. From this, we will explore how indigenous temporalities, imagined as a spiral in motion, challenge the linear chronologies of state power and open space for other ways of being and inhabiting the present. Thus, protest becomes an act of temporal reappropriation, an insurgency that breaks with the idea of contemporaneity and proposes a plural present, inhabited by multiple possible futures.

These issues will be discussed with Ana Cachimuel, commented on by Carmen Ibáñez.