Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar

Los ritmos del Pachakuti (2008) studies the Bolivian cycle from 2000 to 2005, from the Cochabamba water war to the El Alto blockades that brought down two governments. Her reading is that this was not a sum of protests but a political form in its own right, with neighbourhood assemblies, blockade shifts, rotating posts and decisions taken in the street, able to sustain a years-long standoff with no party and no central leadership.

From that comes her concept of the communal-popular: the ways people produce in common what they need — water, housing, care, food, markets — and sustain it by their own rules. Gutiérrez argues that in Latin America's urban peripheries this is not transplanted rural survival but an urban creation, and that it holds the capacity to reproduce life when neither state nor market guarantees it.

A mathematician by training, born in Mexico in 1962, Gutiérrez Aguilar lived those processes at close range: she took part in Bolivian political organising and spent five years in prison, from 1992 to 1997. She is now a professor and researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.

Her later work, in dialogue with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Latin American communal feminism, has put the reproduction of life and care work at the centre, and is one of the references for the feminism that organises neighbourhood by neighbourhood. For urban studies her contribution is uncomfortable and useful: it describes the production of a city without placing the state at the centre of the account.