Research as Reportage

This project traces the history of Post-1960s community politics in the poblaciones along the Zanjón de la Aguadariver through close readings of Pedro Lemebel’s literary journalism (crónicas) in Zanjón de la Aguada (2003), transcripts of his program on Radio Tierra, “Cancionero” (1994-2002), and pirated copies of his work sold in present day street markets. While most scholarship has focused on Lemebel’s perspectives of LGBT discrimination and marginalization, his chronicles of everyday life in Santiago’s poblaciones remain underexamined and untranslated.

Despite increased global inequality, the classed dimensions of LGBT social life has been largely absent from research into the aspirational horizons of  LGBT struggles. This was not the case for the work of Pedro Lemebel.  Lemebel described his crónicas as an attempt “to illuminate the raw event and turn the power off from ontological truth,” and defined the genre as a decolonial alternative to two prevailing modes of expert knowledge production: the journalistic knowledge production of The Newsworthy Event and the anthropological knowledge production of The Other. Consequently, this project examines Lemebel’s chronicles and the publics through which they circulate to analyze how the politics and poetics of autogestión have animated everyday aspirations, imagined futures, and lived practices in Santiago de Chile’s working-class neighborhood communities.