Join us on the Common Notions YouTube channel for the book launch of In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar.
Join us on this panel, accompanying the author we will hear from Dawn Marie Paley, Magalí Rabasa, and Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed in a conversation moderated by Brian Whitener.
Join us on the Common Notions YouTube for a very special livestream. REGISTER HERE
PRESENTERS
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 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.
Dawn Marie Paley is an investigative journalist and editor of Ojala.mx. She’s the author of Drug War Capitalism and Guerra neoliberal: desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México.
Magalí Rabasa is a researcher and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. Her first book, The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground (Pittsburgh UP, 2019; and in translation: Tren en Movimiento Ediciones/Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2021; Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2022; Kikuyo Editorial, 2023) is an exploration of print book culture in contemporary Latin American social movements. She is currently working on a new project examining feminist economies of knowledge in the Americas.
Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural and educational movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions, 2023). At the CUNY Graduate Center, they are a 2023–25 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and are on the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Coco is co-developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones), and is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), Face Down(Timeless Infinite Light, 2016), and The 90s (speCt!, 2022). He is an editor on two forthcoming books: Border Abolition Now (Pluto Press, 2024) and Abolir ya: otra justicia es posible (Andromeda, 2024). Other writing or translation projects include De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes(Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, 2013) and the translations of Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thoughts, Actions, Practices (Common Notions, 2019) and Genocide in the Neighborhood: State Violence, Popular Justice, and the ‘Escrache’ (Common Notions, 2023).