Acuerpar
Acuerpar: Embodied Solidarity and AI Governance
In a world built on colonial foundations using the template of the colonizer, historical and collective trauma run deep. That there has been no accountability or justice for such harm has meant that such harm continues unfettered – even if in different forms. These dynamics underpin engagements across the “global north” and “global south,” with very little attempt to introspect on how power continues to be held, used, and reproduced. They also constitute the foundation on which wealthy and institutionally white states are able to play a key role in the development and design of AI, without taking into account the voices or lived experiences of communities in the majority world. Data are being extracted, and resources like land and water are being appropriated, while communities seldom enjoy the benefits of the technologies that emerge from these efforts.
Acuerpar, conceptualised by Indigenous Feminists in Central America, offers a powerful route to interrogate this reality. Calling for embodiment, it is an invitation to collective work, to show up fully.
Understanding Acuerpar
The term acuerpar was conceptualized by Indigenous Feminists in Central America, where it emerged at a feminist encampment in Honduras that was protesting in demand for justice for the murder of Lenca organizer, Berta Caceres. During the trial of the military intelligence officer accused of murdering Berta, Gladys Tzul Tzul, Guatemalan sociologist and expert witness, used the term “territorial feminicide” to describe how Berta’s murder was not just an individual crime but rather a crime against the community life of the Lenca people. Murdering Berta, according to Gladys, was intended to dispossess the Lenca people of their material and spiritual possibilities of life. The group of women who demanded justice for Berta also recognized how Berta’s death represented both the occupation of their lands and perpetration of large-scale violence on women by extractive industries, much like their European and US imperialistic predecessors.
Acuerpar means to “embody.” It is a political act of showing up, in person, for the fight. It is an act of giving physicality to the fight that puts pressure on institutions, while bringing us together to allow us to feel supported, heard, and understood. It helps us lean on each other to gather strength and vigour. As Lorena Cabnal notes, “Acuerpamiento or acuerpar [refers to] the personal and collective action wherein our bodies, outraged by the injustices experienced by other bodies, self-convene to provide themselves with political energy. [This act of gathering] generates affective and spiritual energies. It provides us with closeness and collective indignation but also revitalization and new strength, so that we may recover joy without losing indignation.”
Acuerpar invites us to reflect on how empathy stops short because of its inherent power dynamics. Empathy does not invite a reflection on our power and privilege to “imagine” another’s challenges and fictitiously put ourselves in their shoes. Empathy does not invite a reflection on how we have the power and privilege to step out of the story or turn off a social media post that triggers us while those whose life stories it tells continue to audition for our attention. Empathy comes with a ceiling that lets us think that our “show of solidarity” is inherently woven with the label of choice we pick for ourselves without interrogating coloniality, racism, casteism, and capitalism. As Leila explains, white feminism has “mobilised ideas of empathy in order to smooth over horrific inequalities,” and “enables us to deny any complicity with the root causes of people’s suffering.”
Learning from Acuerpar to govern AI
Acuerpar reflects the collective care practices that bodies undertake to hold space for each other and for the land in the face of capitalist extraction and gendered and racialized violence. It argues that meaningful solidarity relies less on our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of others, which is the disembodied empathy of liberal frameworks, and more on our openness to encounter difference through the “messy doing of care.” It is a call to be with, rather than to be in another’s shoes. Instead of solidarity as a cognitive exercise, acuerpar invites a physical, embodied co-presence that remakes the world through mutual aid. Bodies are not abstract in this framework. Rather, they are the sites where governance is felt, and where harms from systems, including algorithmic systems, are first registered.
The territorial dimensions of AI must not be allowed to disappear when the conversation turns to governance. Berta Cáceres was murdered because her body stood between a river and those who intended to profit from it. The infrastructure of AI enacts a parallel logic: data centers consume enormous quantities of water and land; undersea cables and satellite systems are routed through and over Indigenous territories without consent; and AI-driven tools increasingly serve extractive industries by optimizing mining for rare earth minerals, enabling precision agribusiness, and facilitating the surveillance of land defenders. The colonial dispossession named at the opening of this piece does not stop at the data layer. An AI governance practice shaped by acuerpar must therefore hold land as a living, relational entity at the center of its deliberations. Land is not a resource variable to be managed, but territory whose integrity is inseparable from the integrity of the communities it sustains.
For AI governance, acuerpar presents a challenge to disembodied, technocratic policy-making that designs AI systems from a distance, without the presence of affected communities. Current AI governance processes, ranging from the standards bodies to impact assessments, all largely operate through representation at best, and extraction at worst. Communities provide data, feedback, or case studies, but their bodies, territories, and lived expertise are not present in decision-making rooms. Acuerpar calls for embodied participation, in the form of governance structures where affected communities are not consultants but co-designers, where their physical presence and experiential knowledge are considered irreplaceable inputs.
Consider two scenes. In the first, a policy consultation on AI-driven welfare systems invites a community organizer from an affected neighborhood to present her findings to a panel of technologists and civil servants. She speaks for fifteen minutes. Questions are asked. Notes are taken. The meeting ends, and everyone returns to their respective worlds. In the second, the design process is held over three days in the community itself. Governance practitioners eat together, walk the neighborhood, hear testimony that is not time-limited, and are asked at the end not what they have decided but what they have understood. The first scene is empathy: structured, bounded, extractive. The second is closer to acuerpar: messy, slow, and materially inconvenient for those who hold power. The difference is not only procedural. It is a difference in who is changed by the encounter.
This has practical implications. AI governance bodies should be physically co-located with affected communities across the AI lifecycle. Participatory processes must account for those whose relationship to technology is mediated through their bodies (workers in data labelling, communities in surveillance zones, land defenders whose territories are mapped by extractive AI). Accountability frameworks must recognize that harm to one body and one territory is harm to the collective.
Physical co-location is a necessary but insufficient condition for acuerpar in governance. The deeper question is who sets the terms of participation once everyone is in the room. What language are deliberations conducted in, and who bears the cost of translation? What counts as evidence: a peer-reviewed paper, or a grandmother’s account of what the river did before the data center arrived? Whose emotional testimony is treated as information, and whose is treated as disruption? Acuerpar demands that these questions be answered before a governance process begins, not after it has already reproduced the hierarchies it claimed to address. It insists that the architecture of participation, namely the agenda, the format, the epistemological ground rules, must itself be negotiated collectively, with those most affected holding genuine power over how their knowledge enters and shapes the room.
Acuerpar is not only an invitation extended to marginalized communities to show up, but also is an equally uncomfortable demand directed at those already in the room. The bodies of AI governance practitioners carry their own histories: of insulation from consequence, of institutional comfort, of the ability to leave a meeting and return to a life unaffected by the decisions made within it. To practice acuerpar in governance spaces means that those with power must also reckon with what their own embodied position represents, not merely as a cognitive acknowledgment of privilege, but as a felt, physical accountability. Showing up fully requires those at the center to sit with discomfort rather than manage it, to resist the impulse to retreat into proceduralism when the weight of harm becomes difficult to hold.
Acuerpar also invites a more playful and vulnerable epistemic stance in governance. It calls for resisting the authoritarian certainty of technical expertise and opening space for what María Lugones calls ‘world-traveling’, which is an openness to surprise and self-reconstruction that is essential for just governance.
María Lugones describes world-traveling as requiring a particular kind of openness to surprise, to appearing foolish, to being reconstructed by encounter with difference. This is deeply countercultural in AI governance spaces, where authority is performed through certainty, technical fluency, and the management of ambiguity rather than its embrace. Yet acuerpar insists that genuine co-presence demands vulnerability. It asks governance practitioners to enter spaces where their expertise is not the most valued form of knowledge, where the protocols they are accustomed to do not apply, and where being moved emotionally, intellectually, and relationally is not a sign of weakness but a precondition for legitimacy. A governance culture capable of this is not softer than the current one. It is more honest, and therefore more just.
This article draws from the wisdom, practices, and life work of Indigenous groups. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider making a donation to COPINH or MILPAH or any other Lenca people’s organizations or initiatives to support the lives and work of people from the Lenca community.
References
Cabnal, L. (2010). “Acercamiento a la construcción de la propuesta de pensamiento epistémico de las mujeres indígenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala.” In Feminismos diversos: El feminismo comunitario. Ciudad de Guatemala: ACSUR-Las Segovias.
Méndez, M. J. (2023). Acuerpar: the decolonial feminist call for embodied solidarity. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 49(1), 37–61.
Indiegraf. (n.d.). “Three Latin American Activism Terms for your Journalism.”
Méndez, M. J. (2018). “‘The River Told Me’: Rethinking Intersectionality from the World of Berta Cáceres.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 29(1):7–24.
Lugones, M. (2025). Playfulness, “world”-traveling, and loving perception. In The Latinx Philosophy Reader (pp. 185–198). Routledge.
