Abstract

Printed popular poetry (called “Lira popular”) was a phenomenon where literary and journalistic aspects were joined. Their authors (at least 20 has been identified) became opinion leaders who wrote about religious and love issues, but also about social problems, political news, crimes, etc., with an own point of view. Most of them were “gañanes”: “workers without qualification, with unstable employments, often underemployed” (Romero, 1987: 82), which found a way to make a living selling their poems in streets, markets and squares. This phenomenon began in 1860s and declines from 1910s onwards, losing gradual relevance and visibility in relation to the first mass newspapers, oriented to the popular sectors, but from an industrial and commercial logic. Popular satirical press is another case where we can find popular sectors doing media outside of oligarchic politics or of the first workers political projects. A very important milestone for this was the press law of 1872 that eliminated previous restrictions. Although this press boarded social or political issues in an humoristic way, this was done in a nearest way to the carnival laugh (Bajhtin, 1990; Salinas et al, 1996) than to the modern satire (Knight, 2004; Hodgart, 2010). Both are cases of alternative communication, following to Downing, Atton and Rodríguez in this concept; i.e., media “generally on a small scale in many different forms, which express alternative visions of dominant perspectives, priorities, and policies” (Downing, 1984: 52), defined “by their capacity to generate non-standardized, often outlawed methods of creation, production, and distribution, as well as by their content” (Atton, 2002: 4), whose ultimate purpose is the democratization of communication (Rodríguez, 2001). But in the accumulated research the concept of alternative communication in a long term perspective has not been used to understand them (Donoso, 1950; Lenz, 2003; Santa Cruz, 2010; Zaldívar, 2004). The purpose of this communication is to present an analysis of circuits of production and circulation, as well as the worldviews transmitted by these media. Specifically, the way in which they incorporate the traditional popular culture of many of their authors and the way in which they mix it (or not) with ideas or principles of the modern enlightened discourse. These cases are part of a wider research under my charge, based on historical archives and press archives, called “Toward a sociology of a popular culture absent: corporality, representation and mediatization of 'the popular repressed' and 'the popular not represented' in Santiago of Chile (1810-1925), funded by the National Comission of Science and Technology. The underlying hypothesis of this research is that there is a continuous (and persistent) circuit of popular culture “absent” (neither illustrated as the worker culture nor massive as the cultural industry, while in relation with both) in which it is possible to identify different experiences, some of them holding forms of continuity even up to the present (as the Printed popular poetry and the hip hop, for instance). Fundamentally, my idea is that make “visible” this popular culture “absent”, understanding the politicity of this forms of expression and communication as a way to think about social change today from a decolonial perspective.