In Defense of Common Life

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).

“Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is not only an innovative theorist but also an inspiring activist. This beautifully edited and translated volume charts her extraordinary political trajectory and presents some of her vital contributions to contemporary political and theoretical debates. With this English-language edition, new audiences will be able to benefit from her important work.”—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies and coauthor of Bolivia Beyond the Impasse “In Defense of Common Life is a magnificent introduction of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s work to a wider audience. It crystallizes hard-won insights gleaned from four decades of political struggle in Latin America. She interrogates political organization, feminist praxis, and making–the essential social force that capital can never fully contain. To escape capitalism and stultifying definitions of revolution, she illuminates paths to imagine the world anew. Here is a text to wrestle with–– a gift in translation.”—Christina Heatherton, author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution“Few walk the walk that Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar has, through her involvement in militant struggles such as the Ejército Guerrillero Tupac-Katari and the Water Wars and gas conflicts of Bolivia. In Defense of Common Life movingly presents some of the lessons she has learned along the way as ‘concisely as possible.’ These lessons are about autonomy, the value of lengthy discussion, and the difficult and yet crucial attention that the communal deserves in the fervor of revolutionary struggle. As such, this book is both a handbook for the future and a careful assessment of a complicated past.”—Juliana Spahr, author of Du Bois’s Telegram“Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s brilliant analysis on the possibility of the commons helps us find ways to re-orient ourselves amidst the uncertainties of the political moment we are living in.  Her nuanced and deeply critical political vision sheds light on what is enabled and possible when we look at the commons as the horizon for a politics centered around the very possibility of (re)production of life on earth. Critical of the different forms of complicity with neoliberal capitalism that leftist administrations have enabled, she looks at the complexity of articulating forms of collective desire that can channel social wealth to materialize ways of being in common. Translating these works by one of the most important contemporary Latin American thinkers of the moment, allows us to understand different lines of history that permeate the question of the common, while facing the recurrence of state and capitalist captures of collective energies. Without posing easy formulas, Raquel offers critical trajectories to understand histories that are not much known in the North, thus open the possibility of inspiring readers to connect with and plot around key issues that traverses different geographies.”—Susana Draper, author of Libres y Sin Miedo: Horizontes feministas para construir otros sentidos de justicia and coeditor of Feminicide and Global Accumulation

• 1. “Raquel Gutiérrez: Militant Commoning” by Brian Whitener2. “In Defense of Common Life:” An Interview with Raquel Gutiérrez3. “Beyond the Power of the Veto”4. “Producing the Common”