Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian feminist, sociologist, historian, and colonization theorist born on this day in 1949. Cusicanqui is a well-known "decolonial" thinker in Latin America, although she contests the term. She draws upon anarchist theory as well as Quechua and Aymara cosmologies in her writings.

Cusicanqui has been critical of what she calls the "political economy of knowledge". She condemns scholars who are now in positions of power both home and abroad; accusing them of "building a small empire within an empire", appropriating the contributions of Global South scholars for their own gain without a meaningful dialogue with their counterparts.

Cusicanqui is also an activist who works directly with indigenous movements in Bolivia, such as the Katarista movement and the coca growers movement.

"There is then, in these spaces of the unsaid, a set of sounds, gestures, movements that carry living traces of colonialism and that resist rationalization, because their rationalization is uncomfortable, it challenges the comfortable dream of liberal society."

- Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui