Utopia turns five hundred this year. Thomas More — lawyer, author, theorist, radical, martyr, saint — gave us the word with his 1516 book Utopia. In many ways More merely described the contours of an imagined land that had always existed, from the coasts of Plato’s Republic to the hills of medieval Cockaigne. Yet in painting a picture of that aspirational place, More bequeathed to radicals one of our most potent concepts.

At the same time, a profound ambiguity has marked the word from its earliest days. In 1535, the Franciscan friar Vasco de Quiroga translated More’s Utopia into Spanish while working as a missionary in Mexico. De Quiroga sent the now-lost rendering to More, who was executed for opposing the king’s divorce (among other reasons) before he could read it.

Undaunted, De Quiroga began organizing the indigenous population into planned communities based on the political principles of his hero’s book. These were the first “intentional communities” — in the New World or elsewhere — that explicitly and consciously organized under the utopian banner.