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"To not forget!!!
Maritza Montero is one of the most lucid and committed voices in social transformation in psychology. Probably most of you know that, before graduating in psychology, Maritza graduated as a lawyer. And I believe that this part of her personal trajectory contributed to her emphasis on committing psychology to social justice. Her critical thinking transformed the way we conceive the relationship between psychology, power and social transformation. She adopted a reflective and critical stance, challenging the traditional paradigms of psychological science and pushing psychology to engage with social issues, promoting empowerment and social justice. She has taught that knowledge is meaningful when it is built to address real life issues, that our knowledge as academics should serve marginalised communities and support their and our liberation. We can honour her legacy by continuing to work and strengthen the role of community psychology as a situated science that serves collective dignity and justice. "
Cinzia Albanesi, Professora Ordinaria, Università di Bologna
"Maritza Montero:
A Pioneer and Pillar of International Community Psychology
Maritza Montero passed away on July 23, 2025. The news arrived during the ECPA Conference in Lisbon, attended by many community psychologists from various European and international countries. The immediate outpouring of condolences was unanimous, as was evident in the tributes addressed to her during the General Assembly. It's not easy to summarize how much Maritza has meant to Italian community psychology, considering her role and importance as a theorist and activist engaged in the community in her specific context, Latin America, but also with a profound impact in other Italian and international contexts. Here I will limit myself to retracing some personal memories, having had the great pleasure of knowing her personally.
Personal Memories
Marisa also studied in Italy, in Venice: and indeed, she spoke perfect Italian! My memories date back to 2010, when I first met her at the 3rd International Conference on Community Psychology in Puebla, Mexico. Her keynote address impressed me greatly because I recognized all the fundamental theoretical and ethical themes of the discipline with extraordinary clarity and effectiveness. For this reason, I asked her if she would be willing to use her contribution as a chapter in a volume I was writing on Community Psychology. And so it was (Zani, 2012, reprint 2024):
Her chapter: From complexity and social justice to conscience: ideas that built community psychology, discusses the central ideas that have been the basis of the education of generations of Italian students: The idea of contextual ecology / The idea of relationship / Otherness / The participation-commitment binomial / The idea of symmetrical power / An idea derived from need: empowerment / The idea of praxis / The relationship between ideas, theoretical concepts and social problems / The idea and presence of conscience / Challenges and conclusions.
Furthermore, together with Elena Marta, we invited her as a guest speaker at the 9th National Conference of SIPCO, Milan, September 27-29, 2012. It was an important opportunity to network and exchange on various topics of community psychology and Liberation psychology in Europe and Latin America, including with young SIPCO members.
Our last meeting was in Santiago, Chile, in 2018, at the 7th International Conference of Community Psychology, where she received a moving standing ovation in recognition of her work. Marisa was still active but already suffering, and I greeted her fondly.
I remember her as a kind, warm person, a lover of Italy—as she often repeated—and above all, a figure of great importance and simple at the same time, as only cultured, highly competent, and authoritative people can be."
Prof. Bruna Zani, Presidente Fondazione Minguzzi, Bologna
"Memorial for Maritza
Maritza Montero and I shared a passion not only for community psychology but for traveling around the world, and we enjoyed to see several times places we loved. Marika told me she wanted to see Rome again after we met in Chile in 2009 and I said we had a room in my home with a view of Castel San Angelo and she came as soon as she could and we spent a week together. We had animated discussions, Maritza blamed European colonialists for ruining South America and wanted European community psychologists to spread the liberation and decolonization viewpoints. I thought that many members of the elite in Latin America, including university professors consider themselves victims, instead they have some power and could do more for their indigenous minorities and their poor in the favelas. The situation in Europe was similar, we have huge gender, race, economic and educational disparities, but many members of the elite choose to blame migrants and homeless, instead of helping groups in need. That is why some European community psychologists are so eager to find methods to empower the disempowered like poor elders, homeless, migrant minors alone, abused women, unemployed, climate change victims, fight gender gap and etc.
We preached our different ideas to each other since we both were talkative and passionate. But we influenced each other, Maritza admitted they had to develop more methods (Montero & Sonn 2011) and when Carocci asked me to make a new version our first CP I wrote a whole chapter (Francescato Tomai 2023, 2025, with shorter English version in Amazon) on theoretical theories created all over the world, and Maritza would enjoy my last article titled “What can we learn from critical, liberation, and decolonization community psychologists of the global South? “
Besides CP, Maritza and I shared the joy to admire beauty in nature and art. So we walked around Rome like teenagers laughing and singing our favorite songs. Moreover, Maritza enchanted my husband Bill who remained in Italy for our good food confessing to him she loved it too, and so Bill told her he would show her his favorites, so every night we ate in one of Bill’s small restaurants. I remember with particular joy an evening in a restaurant, in the Gianicolo, facing Garibaldi’s museum. I was trying to narrate the stories of Anita Garibaldi and her husband Giuseppe, but Bill e Maritza wanted only totalk about the food they were tasting and get a little bit of each others’ goodies so we switch plates so that all three could eat bites and share the pleasures of each. We behaved like cooperative community psychologists. I remember with much nostalgia the musical laughter of Maritza and the joy on our three faces. Maritza invited us to visit some splendid isles north of Venezuela, but I forgot their name, I hope to ask it to Maritza’s daughters.
Maritza became sick and lost her brilliant mind, we had discussed this topic because I had confided that I had begun to forget things. Both us were scared to have some kind of dementia but we console each other telling us that we had written many books and articles and our students especially our female ones would continue our paths even better than us. And we were right. If you read the last two chapters of our last CP handbook, you can see how many beautiful experiences of clinical and social community psychologists in many fields from promoting energy saving, to improve the life of homeless, to help teachers, parents and students to understand emotions and promote wellbeing, empowering the renewal of broken neighborhoods, using online platforms to create discussion groups on gender violence, creating new services, helping migrant women forced to become sex workers etc.
Maritza would be happy seeing how the last international conference held in Lisboa in July 23-25 2025 had topics she cherished and how we blended liberation struggles, climate justice, creative expression and resistance, healing through sound and stories, etc. She died the day the conference started but she was present in all our hearts."
Prof. Donata Francescato, Presidente Aspic, Università la Sapienza, Roma
"Até sempre Professora Maritza Montero!
We have received the news of the passing of Professora Maritza Montero during the European Community Psychology Conference, organised by the ECPA and held at ISPA in Lisboa, Portugal. We immediately dedicated the ongoing sessions to her memory. In the closing ceremony, our colleagues presented a tribute about her contributions and influence on the field of community psychology in the Americas and the World.
Professora Maritza Montero visited us in 2008 at the II International Conference on Community Psychology, and we had the opportunity to then publicly appreciate her work and contributions to the field. Her books and articles integrated the syllabus of community psychology and community development undergraduate, master's and doctoral programs. We therefore thank Professora Maritza Montero for her contributions towards this scientific and intervention field."
Maria Vargas-Moniz & José Ornelas, ISPA
"Honouring Maritza Montero
Professor Maritza Montero was an old-school intellectual in the sense of being not only a scholar of international standing in several fields, including historical, philosophical, theoretical, methodological, empirical and praxis dimensions of community psychology; liberation psychology; and social psychology, but a scholar characterised by absolute intellectual integrity and unremitting thoroughness in everything she undertook.
Her publications were object lessons in intellectual incisiveness but even the syllabus and pre-reading provided by Professor Montero for a fleeting summer school in Oslo was without intellectual compromise, painstakingly focused and almost obsessively lengthy. As a teacher, Professor Montero was not only a brilliant lecturer but also exceptionally generous with her time. When Maritza Montero visited me at Stirling University, Scotland, she kindly contributed to the undergraduate module in community psychology, which I had established at Stirling. Although her sophisticated content could have been intimidating to undergraduates, Maritza ensured exemplary accessibility and exhibited endearing humility.
Years after I had left Stirling University (after my community and critical psychology teaching had been closed down against my wishes), I received an email from a former Stirling community psychology student who identified herself as one of the students who came to my office for further discussion with Maritza Montero after a lecture, an invitation seldom afforded by local and less eminent lecturers! I was also privileged to spend time with Professor Montero on a number of memorable occasions at international conferences.
As a person I found Maritza to be patient, calm, almost serene, with seldom an unkind word about the work of others working within differing frames of reference and paradigms. Maritza was unfailingly supportive to me personally, although my more confrontational style of operation was not to her taste and my commitment to a critical approach to community psychology was different to her own. Maritza Montero had more time and tolerance for United Statesian community psychology, its founding myths, founding ‘fathers’ and universalisation of local US culture, than I had (I regarded United Statesian community psychology as a juggernaut of intellectual colonisation not in the interests of diverse more radical European community psychologies – and I still do). Professor Montero’s championing of a ‘critical’ approach to community psychology’ drew more on South American Liberation Psychology and the work of Freire and Martin Baro, whereas my championing of ‘critical’ communities drew more on European Critical Theory and the work of Foucault and the Frankfurt School."
Prof. David Fryer
"Remembering Maritza Montero
I met Maritza Montero through her writings, which made me appreciate the depth and importance of her work. With great emotion, I listened to her at the International Community Psychology Conferences, in Puebla in 2010 and then also in Santiago in 2018. I particularly remember our Italian Conference promoted by SIPCO-Italian Society of Community Psychology, held in Milan in September 2012, where she was not only a keynote speaker but also conducted a pre-workshop, which was fundamental for the cultural growth of the young community psychologists participating in the meeting.
In my experience, her figure is also linked to her excellent chapter published in Zani's 2012 book: her depth of thought, her vision of critical community psychology, and the rigor of her theoretical research – which is the basis for effective interventions – helped train a generation of students who, through her words, understood how much we owe to Latin America scholars, from the concept of conscientization to the way of operating Action Research and increasing participation, overcoming the boundaries of US-centric and North Western traditional model.
She is, surely, a fundamental reference for all of us."
Prof. Patrizia Meringolo, University of Florence
"Maritza Montero wrote in 1994 “Psicología Social Comunitaria: Teoría, Método y Experiencia (1994), together with Esther Wiesenfeld. Both of them, alongside Irma Serrano Garcia, created the shift from a US rooted Community Psychology to a worldwide perspective focalized on a decolonial approach. She put all her energy and her wisdom in the development of community psychology in a southern perspective also collaborating in 2006 to the setting of the first ICCP in Puerto Rico. I meet her there and then again and again trough the world. There, she also introduced us to Mariachi, a wedding music of Mexican origin, well known in the Caribbean culture, that was performed at our conference social dinner. The dissemination of different cultures facing the western hegemony was a crucial issue, in her vision to pursue also in the entertainment time of such a global conference.
She extends her international work through different continents finding in the Australian Christopher Sonn a young and committed ally. In the occasion of the biannual Sipco conference, in Milan at the Stelline of via Magenta, an old Milanese reformatory, boarding school for underprivileged children, she shared some memories related to her being une fille bien rangè, such as Simone de Beauvoir described. We were teasing about the conventual influence in our life: she could not expect that her studies in a severe catholic convent of nuns would be the backbone to became a scientist and activist for human rights! I was considering that feminine school teach us that in education women can show their excellence and have not to be inferior.
Once she told me that she strongly appreciated my last article in community psychology and I was very proud of her recognition. She is one of our giants, a powerful iconography of a great feminine heritage. A strong legacy for her beloved daughters and all of us!"
Prof. Caterina Arcidiacono, ICCP consultative and organizational board.
"The embrace for Maritza
It is saddening to receive the news of Maritza Montero’s death. I first met Maritza in person in 1993 at the Society for Community Research and Action's (SCRA) conference. I was attending my first Community Psychology conference where Maritza was an invited keynote speaker. Maritza spoke on the topic of Latin American Social Community (SC) and Liberation Psychology (LP), and North American Community Psychology (CP) – building bridges. I remember her talk well. I fondly recall spending time with her and others exploring parts of Williamsburg, Virginia. While I was drawn to the work that she presented, it was her sense of humour and generosity that stood out to me even more.
I did not see her again in person for many years after that conference, but I had encounters with her through her critical scholarship, which opened my world to Latin American LP and SC. I next saw her at the International Community Psychology Conference in 2006, an event that she played a role in imagining. It was around this time, too, that Maritza and I were working on the Psychology of Liberation book, which she liked to call the blue book. We shared across two parts of the global south as I connected the threads of critical race scholarship and LP to the struggles of migrant communities from South Africa in Australia.
Maritza was to me a generous teacher and mentor in our collaboration on the blue book. It was a process that opened and expanded our horizons together. I visited her home country, Venezuela, in 2010 to attend the Liberation Psychology Congress and to celebrate our book. The book was ahead of its time but is very needed today as we revitalize the values and goals for applied psychologies that can support change in these deeply unsettling times. Maritza was careful not to take on the weight of the world, not to overestimate the role that psychology can play, to value the efforts of people around the world, and to embrace co-creating new horizons for community and liberation psychology.
Maritza generously shared with me stories about her country, community, its history, and so much more -- stories rich in her insights about colonialism, struggle, and dreams of other worlds and the role of liberation psychologies in change. These included valuing and engaging with the lifeworlds, the epistemes, of peoples pushed to the margins through various forms of structural and symbolic violence. We continued to collaborate over email and shared aspects of our work and lives with each other. She had a hectic schedule, travelling and delivering lectures and invited talks. I do not think she said no to many requests; she was generous.
Maritza drew important connections between political and community psychology, and in particular, Liberation Psychology. She encouraged me to read Enrique Dussel’s Liberation Philosophy, among other writers. Dussel’s work informed calls for moving beyond the dialectic, the embrace of that which is beyond the totality, beyond the idea of ‘being included’ into the totality. Maritza imagined new horizons, a decolonial possibility and an approach to psychology deeply rooted the relational epistemologies and ethics, as well as praxis and analectic methods, ways of doing and knowing from below, and with those constructed and positioned as ‘other’.
Our paper on the synergies between Community and Liberation Psychology drew this out more, the call for analectic methods, for epistemic justice, and knowledge construction for change with and for people. Maritza was generous, witty, and a joy to spend time with. I looked forward to it and she made time for us to meet when we were in the same place. During one of the days of the peace psychology symposium held in Malaysia, we went to shop at a local market and mall. She was very particular about the things she bought. Once she even picked out a cap for me, which I needed in the tropical heat. She did not like the camouflage/khaki cap that I had my eye on, for her, it resembled something that belonged to the military. Maritza introduced me to her favourite dishes when we shared dinner in Lisbon, like the amazing grilled fish and what she described as green wine made with young grapes.
Maritza was a wonderful supportive role model and friend to me. The last time I saw her in person was in Chile in 2018 at the ICCP. I am so glad that I did get to talk with her on that occasion, it was the last time I saw her in person. At the conference, she received a lifetime award in recognition of her significant contribution to transformative critical liberation and community psychologies. I will continue to embrace Maritza Montero’s legacy in my work."
Christopher C. Sonn, Victoria University, Australia |
