La palabra soberana

Los pobladores chilenos frente a la política

Abstract

This article offers a new perspective of the social imaginary of “pobladores”, Chile’s shantytown inhabitants. Although the pobladores had emerged as a new «social actor» leading the massive national demonstrations (1983-1989) against the military regime of A. Pinochet, after the first years of the democratic transition (1990), they seem to have fallen into a participative apathy, a change which until now has puzzled many social scientists. We propose to understand this situation, as well as other present socio-political trends, by means of a Discourse Analysis of pobladores’ life histories and their interdiscursive relations, in which the fundamental differences which exist between the representations of politics in the pobladores’ discourse as opposed to those of other political discourses, are made evident.