The ethnographies in this dossier show the frictions, differences and even contradictions in cultural dynamics when traditional ways of organizing life, the longing to recover the past and keep it alive, internal social rules, moral principles, the demands and aspirations of younger generations, external and internal intellectual proposals, learning to organize political struggles and dialogues with the State, the influence of markets, national policies and the multiple paths to achieve the desired futures come together. If there is one tradition worth remembering from the utopian proposals of the last centuries, it is that the subject of change requires the collectivity to develop its capacity for agency towards change, towards the dreamed horizon.

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.

This article addresses the creation and consolidation of the ejido El Porvenir, an agricultural community located in the Guadalupe Valley, Baja California, as one of the agrarian distribution projects undertaken by the Mexican State. To this end, we describe and analyze the substantive facts in the temporary development of the ejido and its community expectations in a border context subject to the corporatist practices of the Mexican State and the pressures of the regional market, private initiative, competition with neighboring communities and climatic phenomena. The research is based on governmental and private archives, bibliographic and hemerographic consultations, memories and testimonies in physical and digital formats.