Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
Edited by Brian Whitener
Translated by JD Pluecker

Feminism / Latin America / Ecology / Social Movements

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 of In Defense of Common Life, a new audience of English-language readers can finally engage with the thought and political experience of a think and militant, whose contributions to social movements spans an incredible political and regional breadth, and resonates deeply with current debates with the US about the conditions and practices of revolutionary change, feminism, and popular struggle. 

Lucia Cavallero, Verónica Gago, Liz Mason-Deese

Feminism / Latin America

The home has become a laboratory for capital but also for forms of financial disobedience. 

It has become increasingly clear that home is not a site of private life and isolation, but a battleground where the conflict over the reorganization of working days, over what even counts as labor, is waged. In the very spaces that capital historically sought to portray as an “unproductive” and apolitical space, and refused to pay for, now emerge new forms of debt and profit extraction. Although the home has been transformed into a favored site of finance’s colonization of social life and of experimentation for capital, this is not a finished process—or one without its resistance. 

The Home as Laboratory traces this story through the links between debt and financial technologies, the violence of property, and reproductive and feminized labor, and everyday forms of feminist organizing. Drawing on militant research and interventions with feminist organizers in informal settlements and renters’ organizations in Buenos Aires, Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese offer a powerful feminist methodology that points to the vital space of the home as an open dispute. They critically analyze the changes that have occurred in domestic routines, in labor dynamics, in the very cuts imposed by the pandemic’s reorganization of the sensible and of logistics. Thus, the home—its spatiality, functioning, and dynamics—suffered from reconfigurations during these novel years of the COVID-19 pandemic that have not ended. Yet, these processes are also resisted by feminist organizations, which have put the question of debt at the forefront of alliance-building, political education, and public interventions. 

The Home as Laboratory provides key insights into transformations in the home leading up to and during the pandemic, showing how what was historically considered an “unproductive space” became a crucial laboratory for capital and new financial technologies. Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese analyze how the home has become a site of battles over what work is considered essential, the intensification of paid and unpaid work, often at the same time, the expansion of new forms of financial extraction, and multiple and interconnected forms of violence. But, importantly, by highlighting the research and action of feminist and housing organizations, they also demonstrate how these processes are being resisted on a daily basis.

Joy James

Abolition / Black Liberation / Feminism

New Bones Abolition addresses “those of us broken enough to grow new bones” in order to stabilize our political traditions that renew freedom struggles.

Reflecting on police violence, political movements, Black feminism, Erica Garner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, caretakers and compradors, Joy James analyzes the “Captive Maternal,” which emerges from legacies of colonialism, chattel slavery and predatory policing, to explore the stages of resistance and communal rebellion that manifest through war resistance. She recognizes a long line of gendered and ungendered freedom fighters, who, within a racialized and economically-stratified democracy, transform from coerced or conflicted caretakers into builders of movements, who realize the necessity of maroon spaces, and ultimately the inevitability of becoming war resisters that mobilize against genocide and state violence.

New Bones Abolition weaves a narrative of a historically complex and engaged people seeking to quell state violence. James discusses the contributions of the mother Mamie Till-Mobley who held a 1955 open-casket funeral for her fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, murdered by white nationalists; the 1971 rebels at Attica prison; the resilience of political prisoners despite the surplus torture they endured; the emergence of Black feminists as political theorists; human rights advocates seeking abolition; and the radical intellectualism of Erica Garner,  daughter of Eric Garner slain in 2014 by the NYPD.

Joy James positions the Captive Maternal within the evolution of contemporary abolition. Her meditation on, and theorizing of, Black radicals and revolutionaries works to honor Agape-driven communities and organizers that deter state/police predatory violence through love, caretaking, protest, movements, marronage, and war resistance.

E Morales-Williams

Abolition / Feminism

A powerful guidebook for healing and resistance for young girls and gender-expansive youth of color on how to unite, heal, protect, and lead their communities.

Turn Up For Freedom helps youth leaders hone their skills to build personal, emotional, and collective freedom. It centers youth leadership through principled positions, such as being a healer, a protector, a scholar-activist, a community organizer, and being radically joyful, in order to build personal emotional and collective freedom. Through memoir, story telling, and political education, E Morales-Williams grounds these principles in the material experiences of working-class youth and reflects on the possibilities and challenges in practicing them as a collective in under-resourced communities. 

These were the principles of leadership and lessons learned from a Black and Brown girls and gender expansive youth-collective called TUFF Girls (Turning Up for Freedom), based in North Philadelphia. Morales-Williams carefully guides young readers through the challenging issues that confront their lives, helping to identify the traumatic impact that structural violence has on Black and Brown communities, restoring traditions of healing and collective care, and recentering leadership in community as an abolitionist and decolonizing practice. Turn Up For Freedom calls on young people to unite, heal, protect, and lead.