ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the use of myth by the subaltern during social explosion represents an epistemic reconstitution of Chilean nationality that served to empower their autonomous ways of knowing in common founded on a shared collective memory. More precisely, this chapter focuses on one popular subaltern myth from the social explosion: that the Baquedano subway station in Santiago was used by Chilean police as a torture center during the first two weeks of social mobilizations. Though the factuality of this claim was ostensibly disproven by Chile’s National Institute of Human Rights, to focus on this factuality misses that this narrative was engaging an epistemology based on a shared subaltern collective memory of the State’s systemic use of torture. Myth during the Chilean social explosion served as a means of establishing an autonomous subaltern way of knowing in common based in collective memory that challenged the institutionally validated hegemonic epistemology of ‘scientific expertise’ from which their voices had been marginalized.
