In Defense of Common Life
The Essential Political and Theoretical Works of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
The essential political and theoretical work of one of Latin America’s most important contemporary theorists.
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is one of the foremost Latin American political thinkers. From armed Indigenous struggle in the Bolivian altiplano to the contemporary wave of feminist uprisings, Raquel Gutiérrez's life and work have spanned and spurred on some of the most important political sequences in the last forty years in Latin America.
Almost unknown in the United States, Raquel is one of the Latin American anticapitalist, antistate Left's most important contemporary theorists. She has produced important work on communal struggles and political forms and has been at the center of some of the most important political organizing in Bolivia and Mexico in the last forty years.
This volume presents an extensive interview with Raquel in which she charts her political and intellectual trajectory from her militancy in the Ejército Guerrillero Tupac-Katari, to Bolivia's famous Water and Gas wars, to the massive wave of popular feminist rebellions and organizing. Translator and writer, Brian Whitner offers two essays in translation that contain some of her central theoretical concepts, including the veto and reappropriation of communal wealth, for thinking a politics in common, and of the commons.
With the publication ofIn Defense of Common Life, a new audience of English-language readers can finally engage with the thought and political experience of a thinker and militant, whose contributions to social movements span an incredible political and regional breadth, and resonate deeply with current debates with the US about the conditions and practices of revolutionary change, feminism, and popular struggle.
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Mexico City, 1962) is an organizer who has participated in numerous struggles and uprisings in Latin America over the last four decades. From the civil wars in Central America in the 1980s to Indigenous uprisings in Bolivia, she has contributed to struggles both as an active participant and as a theorist of movement strategies, horizons and possibilities.
After spending five years in prison in Bolivia, and energized by the Water War in Cochabamba, Gutiérrez Aguilar returned to Mexico in 2001. Since then, she has experimented working with and alongside women in multiple ways: in autonomous organizations, social centers, publishing projects, the academy and, most recently, via journalism with the digital weekly Ojala.mx.
Gutiérrez Aguilar is the author of the following volumes, all of which draw on her life experiences: ¡A desordenar! Por una historia abierta de la lucha social (1995), Desandar el laberinto (1999), and Cartas a mis hermanas más jóvenes 1 y 2 (2020 and 2021), the first of which came out in English as Letter to my younger sisters (2023). She has also written about various struggles and political moments in The Rhythms of the Pachakuti (2014) and Horizontes comunitarios-populares en América Latina (2015).
Together with other comrades, she has compiled experiences and debates taking place among Indigenous and communitarian struggles in Latin America in a three volume series titled Movimiento indígena en América Latina: resitencia y transformación social (2005, 2007 and 2011) as well in Comunalidad, tramas comunitarias y producción de lo común: Debates contemporáneos desde América Latina (2018).
