In Latin America and the Caribbean, it is common that when we talk
about the future, we mention "how far behind we are" with aspirational
discourses in comparison to industrialized nations and other centers of
knowledge. In this article, I present the concept of antifuture to define it
as a negative space of possibility, with a local temporality captured by
dependent, exogenous, colonized, and out-of-place ideas through the
analysis of future traces on cultural artifacts. The notion of antifuture
can be situated through the myth of El Dorado, describing it as a non-place, a space of non-belonging that faces a complex characterization
that appears in the negative spaces of the possible futures. The notion
of antifutures contributes to understanding and deconstructing
exogenous futuristic discourses in Latin America. It provokes the
challenge of devising own futures, situated and local, that are produced from the localities that will live them.