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 Gutiéeacute;rrez 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 of In 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.

Brian Whitener is an associate professor of Spanish at the University at Buffalo and the author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (2019). Other projects include The 90s (2022); Face Down (2016); De gente común: Prácticas estéticas y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes (2013); and the translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero’s Thoughts, Practices, and Actions (2019) with the Mareada Translation Collective.