The goal of this reflection is to lay out that any concept of literacy plays a strategic role inside any culture as it is responsible of strengthening or reducing the social effects produced by some discourses, as well as the material resources that support them. This article expects to analyze some elements that allow to make problematic the contemporary approaches about reading and writing in education, from a decolonial view. From this perspective, in Western society exists a monopoly over the knowledge about literacy, this situation would let the diversity of possibilities of reading and writing at a disadvantage in a dialogue of knowledges. The multimodal discourse theory and the reflections of pedagogy of multiliteracies blow up the writing centered in the graph-alphabetic language to make space for other meaning possibilities. Considering the requests of equity in our societies, it would be inappropriate to refer to literacy as a universally accepted concept.