In this paper we show how organizations and projects anchored in the contemporary indigenous community are structured around imaginaries of the desirable future. We take up the idea of utopia as referring to the possible in order to understand the effects of ethnic claims on the communities themselves. As an orientation towards the future, we discuss the limitations and scope of the concept of utopia for its use as an explanatory category. The empirical referent is the forty-year experience of a Purhépecha community that has mobilized to achieve its recognition.

The objective of this text is to discuss practices, rules, horizons of hope and disenchantment in the composition of community autonomy in San Isidro de la Libertad, Chiapas, based on my ethnographic experience and the experiences of three young community members. Certain local practices confer political power to the autonomy project: making milpa, celebrating saints, holding assemblies, eating as a family, among others. The re-signification of these practices in a collective narrative of the past, present and future of the locality is an unfinished process that I call "utopianization of traditional life". In turn, these practices shape the ideal subject of their community utopia, one that embodies hope but also reflects, generates and comes from multiple fragmentations.