ABSTRACT
Although the Chilean social explosion ignited on 18 October 2019 with massive national-scale protests against Chilean neoliberalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and environmental injustice, this (not incorrect) chronology misses that the movement had taken its first steps during the week of 6 October 2019. During this week, high-school students in Santiago started protesting the government’s imposition of a subway fare raise by collectively evading metro turnstiles and occupying subway stations, effectively transforming the Santiago subway into a public space of insurrection. In this chapter, I trace the history of modern public transportation in Santiago through a reading of the chronicles of the queer, working-class Chilean author and activist, Pedro Lemebel, in order to demonstrate how the Chilean subaltern during the post-dictatorship era had employed Santiago’s public transport as a public space for generating an autonomous collective identity. During the 1990s and 2000s, however, the Chilean State’s hegemonic neoliberal modernization of public transport sought to eliminate that space of oppositional communality. By occupying subway stations in October 2019, then, Santiago’s subaltern communities were reclaiming that space in order to reactivate a public culture that they had previously cultivated in the cultural crucible of public transport as a public space.
