Occupying Language is an open conversation. Through it, Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellin invite readers to join them listen to insurgent movements that have been organizing in Latin America over the past twenty years, and to connect key concepts and language from those struggles with movements in the United States today.

“Language is not neutral,” write Azzellini and Sitrin, “words transport and express concepts and ways of thinking. They can consolidate and perpetuate hierarchies, domination and control just as they can underline equality and strengthen consciousness.” Among the concepts explored in Occupying Langauge are Territory, Assembly, Rupture, Popular Power, Horizontalism, Autogestión (self-administration), and Protagonism. Examples of each term are drawn from different Latin American communities of struggle, from the spreading of Horizontalidad with the popular rebellion in Argentina, and the concept of Territory seen in Bolivia and Mexico, to the construction of Popular Power in the Consejos Comunales in Venezuela, and the vision of interconnected human diversity articulated in the call for “one world in which many worlds fit” by the indigenous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.