Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (1962) is a professor and researcher in the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Autonomous University of Puebla (ICSYH-BUAP) in Mexico. Since 2011 she has organized and coordinated the permanent research seminar "Community Weavings and Forms of the Political." She is part of the research group that organized the First Annual International Congress on Communality in 2015. Currently she is carrying out research on potential paths of social and political transformation that centers a reflection of the material and social reproduction of human and non-human life.

Raquel has been a social activist for decades, she has dedicated her vital energy to encouraging the collective vision of a community-popular horizon of social transformation in the here and now. She was a militant in the Bolivian social revolution in the 1980s and 1990s, co-founded the Comuna group in La Paz, Bolivia, and in 1998 she participated in the popular-comunitarian uprising in Cochabamba known as the "water war." In 2005 she helped found the Centro of Andean and Mesoamerican Studies (CEAM) in Mexico and Bolivia, and between 2007 and 2012 she co-organized the Casa de Ondas, an autonomous space for reciprocity and mutual aid. She is an enthusiatic promoter of the ideas that form a "common sense of dissent," and since 2010 she has been involved in the autonomous publishing collective Pez en el Árbol.

Raquel trained as a mathematian and philosopher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and did a doctorate in Sociology at the ICSYH-BUAP. Her main works include: ¡A desordenar! Por una historia abierta de la lucha social (La Paz, Bolivia, 1995), Desandar el laberinto: Introspección en la feminidad contemporánea (La Paz, Bolivia, 1999), Los ritmos del Pachakuti: Movilización y levantamiento indígena-popular en Bolivia (2000-2005) (Mexico City, 2009), which was translated as Rythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2014), and Horizonte comunitario-popular: Antagonismo y producción de lo común en América Latina (2015). Together with Fabiola Escárzaga and others she has compiled three volumes of Movimiento indígena en América Latina: resistencia y transformación social (Mexico City., 2005, 2006 y 2014).