Includes a series of essays produced by the Uruguayan critic Mabel Moraña, over the last two decades of her intellectual work. The selection criterion responds to the purpose of identifying those essays built around foundational figures of Latin American thought and culture. They are writers and thinkers who have enhanced the regional debate, from the contribution of concepts-metaphors and categories of analysis, poetics of writing, creative interventions, in the renewal of the regional intellectual map and the effort to build channels of mediation and dialogue among the multiple cultural matrices that go through the conflictive and torn Latin American reality. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Jorge Luis Borges, José María Arguedas, Julio Cortázar, Bolívar Echeverría, Pedro Lemebel, constitute the center of a reflection that explores the critical tradition of Latin American thinking. Mabel Moraña is interested in the critical reception of European thinkers in the Latin American cultural field - Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, among others - in the scenario of prolific debates that do not stop questioning the specificity of the Latin American insertion in the civilizing project of the capitalist modernity. Belonging, identity and territoriality; transculturation, heterogeneity, variegation; coloniality and emancipation; Neobaroque and writing; fictionalization of the self and female subjectivity; Modernity and violence are axes that articulate and encourage the essays that make up the present anthology.