Drawing on an extensive literature review, this article traces the history of the New Literacy Studies (nls), from their origins in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s to the decolonial turn that is emerging in Latin America these days. It argues that the nls were not a purely academic project in their beginnings, but a political criticism closely related to the current poscolonial or decolonial thought that questions the policies and discourses that neglect or downplay cultural practices by non-dominant groups in society and, at the same time, reclaims their knowledge, voices, identities and practices. It also argues that literate education in Latin American countries must be a project of educating agents with voice, equipped with the capacity and willingness to think and speak for themselves publicly. To reconstruct this history and ground this argument, the article reviews three major movements behind decolonial thinking : the intellectual movement of the nls; the historical movements of resistance and liberation against colonialism and neocolonialism in Latin America; and the intellectual movement self-named poscoloniality or decoloniality, articulated in recent decades by scholars in Europe, North America and Latin America.