It is October 2019 and Santiago—and beyond the capital, the whole of Chile—feels like it is rising up against decades of serving as South America’s neoliberal laboratory. The country bursts, and a torrent of language and bodies pushes into the newly renamed Plaza Dignidad. Zines are printed and distributed. Social media accounts reproduce protest poetry past and present. A banner reads: “Poesía está en la calle” (Poetry is in the streets).
It is 2022 in Peru, and the back-and-forth of Pedro Castillo’s government has led to his ouster but also, more importantly, to the feeling that Lima has once again usurped the power of the provinces, placing Vice President Dina Boluarte at the helm. In the Andean city of Juliaca, police massacre protesters seeking to stop business as usual after uprisings around the country. Puno, where Juliaca sits, is not Peru, Boluarte announces. The connotations are meant to be obvious: The Andes—whether in Juliaca or, farther south, in Arequipa, Peru’s second city—are not Peru, insofar as the people are “terrucos” (the terrorist smear used to justify the killing of thousands during the internal conflict of the 1980s and 1990s). Insofar as the people are not quite people, by comparison to the whiter costeños of the capital.
But what happens after the repression? After the reformist push and subsequent setbacks? As the demonstrations fade, the cacerolazos grow quiet? That moment after the uprising is what I want to discuss here: the forms of strategy in the poetic archive that emerge from such conditions, exemplified by collectively authored texts and retrospective books like Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín’s Multitudes, among other works. These texts are records of the Estallido Social, the mass uprisings that took place in Chile in October 2019, and of the mass mobilizations in Peru in 2022 and 2023. Why return to those events now, years later? This might seem an anachronistic bid to conduct an aesthetic autopsy on political movements that appear largely moribund. In Chile, the attempt to reform the constitution (the carrot offered via plebiscite in 2020) failed, and hopes for reform via the ballot box evaporated (if such hopes were ever really present). In Peru, Boluarte, the Fujimoristas, and foreign investment (the entities who wield actual power in the country) are as firmly entrenched as ever, despite scandal, corruption, and abysmal levels of public approval.
But the rupture that 2019–20 and 2022–23 represented in these countries (and we could widen this frame to include mass demonstrations in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and elsewhere over the last five years) sheds light on the realities and instability of political struggle in the present. Taking place before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, these uprisings exposed the contradictions and deficits of neoliberal policy, and also the limitations of protests faced with webs of transnational, extractivist capital, repressive governments, and networks of organized crime. My task here is to follow poets as they identify and write a shifting political and literary conjuncture, even in the face of immense stalemate and, more often, defeat. I aim to note a few tendencies that speak to the question of poetic intervention and to call attention to texts that might, in this moment, highlight the possibility of a hemispheric understanding of poetry as a vehicle of dissent and revolutionary demand.
Re-marking Collectivity: Chile, 2019–2020
In an article from January 2020 called “Aquí, Chile: literatura neoliberal y literatura post estallido,” literary critic Patricia Espinosa argues it is wrong to automatically link protest and poetry, or to assume that any formalized poetry emerging from protests might have inherent political effects or an enduring value in political discourse. Espinosa writes:
the signs are there [of a reading of literature within the Estallido] in the midst of screams or murmurs of the multiple cracks and fractures in the shiny and monotonous atmosphere of progress that was an attempted cover-up of the tragedy of living in the most neoliberal country in the world. Because, since forever, the space of good literature has always been the fracture: to inhabit a crack, to provoke a new one, to ignore it, even to reject it. Thus, if literature decides to live in the arid surface that serves as the scenario for the display of power, it won’t be able to survive.[1]
For Espinosa, the space of literature cannot be sustained by lateral movement across the space of political seizure. Instead, she highlights the necessity of wrenching open a zone of aesthetic and political imagination that has yet to be configured. But her argument’s preoccupation with literature’s failure to see itself outside the shout, the crack, or the fissure risks placing her analysis in a reactive and limited relationship to anti-capitalist struggle.
A semi-anonymous pamphlet published in the aftermath of the Estallido, El lenguaje es un arma de largo alcance (Language is a long-distance weapon) is in conversation with these concerns, tracing the sustained nature of political struggle and the place of language and authorship within it. How, El lenguaje asks, do we create a living document of the uprising? How might we avoid the cementing impulse of a belles lettres of the Estallido? Compiled and released in 2020, the book officially has no author, though the project and compilation are credited to poet Flavio Dalmazzo in the colophon. It is composed of text taken from banners, signs, and graffiti from the 2019 protests and thus plays with parataxis of and through documentation, fragmentation, and linear syntactical regulation. Against the neoliberal state’s narratives of progress and glittering surfaces, El lenguaje achieves a monologue that demonstrates a pluralized subjectivity. One sees this from the first line of the book, “Matapacos vive” (Matapacos lives), conjuring the famed Chilean riot dog.[2] A web of banners and slogans follows in flat, uniform, linear prose. Lines like “Satán es la cumbia. Nunca cegarán nuestro tercer ojo” (Satan is cumbia. They’ll never blind our third eye) and “DESEOS SIN FRONTERAS” (Desires without borders) are given the same printed weight as each other and so are received in a dialogical and metonymic relationship. They appear alongside such tonally and stylistically different passages as “Sin permiso me educo y me organizo. Y ellas, ¿dónde están?”[3] (Without asking permission, I educate myself, and I organize myself. And them [female], where are they?). Should we read these phrases as somehow related beyond their presumed spatial proximity during the Estallido? Are they part of the same message? The deliberate obfuscation here is a matter of polyvocal montage that, in effect, attempts to construct a new discursive model in which these signs speak beyond the “arid surface” that Espinosa describes in the passage above.
Carmen Berenguer, one of the major poets of the Chilean neo-avant-garde and the transition from the Pinochet years, provides a critical position that helps further explore some of the linguistic and poetic questions raised by El lenguaje. Her contribution to a 2020 anthology called Por una constitución feminista offers feminist perspectives and demands in anticipation of the referendum on the Chilean constitution. She conjures the work of video artist Luz Donoso, which openly identified the disappeared for the first time in the 1970s. Donoso’s art, Berenguer writes, helped demarcate the site of language’s possibility and highlight the ways that silence hovers at the edges of the juridical.[4] This silence is a product of state-imposed social death, yet it’s undermined by the persistence of the bodies and images of the disappeared in works of protest art such as Donoso’s. In her 1979 piece Acción de apoyo: intervención en un sistema comercial, for instance, an anonymous face was projected onto television screens in a storefront window, intervening directly in a space of consumption. Berenguer’s discussion of Donoso seems to draw a transhistorical connection between Pinochet’s junta and the Estallido, though it raises the question of whether this link collapses the time between these two events and eras into a homogenous, empty time.
The use of the sign “No+” (as in “No+Muertos” [no more deaths]) during the 2019 protests expresses the same question and tension. This slogan served as a means of textualizing the body, mirroring the silhouetted figures of the disappeared that appeared on streets and walls in the late 1980s, and which were now present in widespread performances of “Un violador en tu camino,” a protest song denouncing sexual violence. Berenguer speaks to a necessary conjunctural and historical analysis of the present, which is also to say a poetics, a documentation of the collective linguistic body. All the same, any assumption of a concordance between these events and their representation feels forced or facile. This is because the effort (evidenced in different ways by Berenguer and El lenguaje) to establish a historical continuity in art and literature between distinct moments and uprisings tends, to take Hayden White somewhat out of context, to “lack the capacity to substitute meanings for one another in chains of semantic metonymies that would transform this list of events into a discourse about the events considered as a totality evolving in time.”[5] There is a tension in these works, whether in zines, anthologies, or works of anonymous montage like El lenguaje, and it is one that becomes clearer when we approach a related poetic discourse not from Chile’s Estallido but from the Peruvian uprisings of 2022–23: Where—and this is a historiographic question as well as a poetic and sociological one—does the pueblo, the people, the multitude begin? Where does the space of authorship of an event begin and end?
Learning the Word Pueblo at the Olla Común: Peru, 2022–2023
The title character of Valeria Román Marroquín’s poetry collection ana c. buena (2021) may be a stand-in for the broader, generally feminized, precarious labor force not only in Peru but in countries across the globe, as Noah Mazer says in his translator’s note.[6] I tend to agree with Mazer’s assessment, but the particularities are important, especially when we think of ana c. buena in relation to Román’s later book Multitudes (discussed below). ana c. buena’s focus is largely on the metabolic. Ana, the book’s second-person subject (though the standpoint is at times ambiguous), is placed in relation to sliced onions, beets, and rice, but also in relation to shit, and to the metabolization and digestion of human relationships as well: “the categories withdrawn, / my garbanzos hang back / in the social totality.”[7] Skirting the speaking-for that might easily accompany this poem, Román remains agnostic about the subject’s readiness to push back against oppressive regimes of exploitation and domination within these shifting markers of labor, both waged and reproductive. Time markers (verb tense and conjugation) are skewed, and the subject made subtly multiple. “Ana,” in other words, is implicitly, if only partially, multitudinous. If much of ana is written in what Román calls “pamphlets,” then it is as a quasi-anonymous form of address: The audience is multiple in its indeterminacy. There is a multiplicity not simply of forms (lyric address, agitprop, etc.) but of possibilities of identification (as interlocutor with said forms) within a historically circumscribed conjuncture; the text performs the possibility of transformation into the group, a possibility that Multitudes will more fully exhibit.
There is, however, a confinement and isolation that we have to reckon with in ana c. buena. Indeed, Román’s works express the immense limitations of the forms of solidarity that might emerge from social movements. This limited solidarity manifests as seriality both in the poems’ form (these are serial poems) and in their subjectivity.
we have to refer to the displaced
we have to name them
what is not named does not exist
…………………………………
stacks of offended verbs
murmur upon murmur
skimming observing
from the stomached mouths[8]
An individualized or isolated subject persists in ana, made clear in the “stacks” of verbs, or the “murmur,” which in a kind of protoplasmic latency does not yet “exist” in the anaphoric “we have to,” which in its naming and reference highlights the absent presence of reader and writer. These geosocial strata are, then, not yet we, as the imperative incompletion (“we have to name them”) affirms. It is this call that represents the joint in Román’s poetics, which is subsequently altered by the marches in Lima in 2022–23.
Román wrote Multitudes in the wake of these uprisings, spurred in part by the auto-coup/coup whiplash around the ouster of Pedro Castillo, the president who emerged from the popular classes and was thus outside, strictly speaking, the Limeño elite order (he came to political prominence as the leader of a teachers union strike). I want to concentrate on one section of the book, “La Olla Común” (The common pot), for the way it upends normative ideas of social reproduction and metabolism. First, though, for a sense of the text’s relationship to its titular collective, let’s consider the poem “Multitudes,” dated “Enero 24” (January 24), the day of the Gran Marcha Nacional (The Great National March). This came on the heels of the raid on San Marcos University by state forces on January 21. The army insisted that the university, which had been a staging ground for the first “toma de Lima” (taking of Lima, a series of protest actions and strikes beginning on January 19), had been “invaded” and thus needed direct military intervention, and, according to them, rescue. There, Román writes, as though in a classroom:
our material today:
the pueblo
THE WORD “PUEBLO” there’s no shame in pronouncing it
syllable by syllable BECAUSE IT IS BEAUTIFUL
because its hugeness covers the entirety of totality
all the instants all the contradictions
a maximal word with every word contained in it
smashed words one against the other pressed into the space[9]
We are to believe that we are being taught—that the lesson emerges from the multitudes. While the speaking subject is somewhat difficult to discern, it is worth paying particular attention to these lines. We are at an impasse here because of the question of in-/out-group dynamics. While the multitudes are seemingly exterior to the university (not surprisingly given its actual and imagined gatekeeping), the word pueblo is something that can be taught—though seemingly only by the multitudes, who at the same time must speak, or are made to speak, in the language of the classroom in order to drive home the point: pueblo is a beautiful word.
But if pueblo is a beautiful word, that does not mean anyone and everyone can access it. Román makes this plain in the repeated lines:
when the multitudes arrived
they spoke Quechua and they did not understand them
they spoke Aymara and they did not understand them
the prosecutor came and they did not understand them
the lawyers came and they did not understand them…[10]
Here, the poem subverts the idea that the strike committee, the traditional university and student political structure, the poets, and so forth, have the power to set transformative events in motion. The poem is most interesting as part of a literary-historical intertext, but it cannot join in the carnival of revolt, cannot join with the strike (comprometerse, the Spanish word for joining a strike action, being closer to the English idea of a pledge, including in its subtext of exchange, than to the English verb to join), because of the fluidity of events and the inherent distance from the speaking subject invoked but never entirely inhabited.[11] The ambiguous telos of the word pueblo remains unresolved, and the poem remains isolated by its referential structure. This is not least because the teleology of knowledge seems to always rest at a linguistic distance that acknowledges the beauty of the self-determination of language (what we say when we say “pueblo,” what we say when we say “multitudes”). Yet the poem brings the reader no closer to this splendid linguistic openness than the indefatigable chorus of “and they did not understand them,” lines that are shuffled off to a capacious future in which the poet-speaker remembers:
when the multitudes arrived
I said to my compañeros we will meet with better times
the days when the earth and its product will be ours
………………………………………………………………………
times that we will write
all Peruvians without apparent distinction
ALL THE MULTITUDES
GATHERED IN A SINGLE MULTITUDE
SMASHED ONE AGAINST THE NEXT
an aspirant thinking muscular mass lives
now I pay attention
THAT TIME IS TODAY
the multitudes are here[12]
The pedagogical detour in Multitudes is not, then, the most compelling of its facets, in part because it does not address its own chimerically contradictory poetic vantage. By contrast, in “Olla Común,” toward the middle of Multitudes, we see a capacity for reading the reproductive labor that must be at the heart of any sustained protest and the modeling of the society to come in the encampment. The “Olla Común,” dated February 1 [2023], challenges the common sense at the heart of the Peruvian neoliberal project since Alberto Fujimori, and recognizes the politics of distribution within the protest camp. The laboring body and the figure of hunger as a dialectic in itself are thus emphasized, reminding readers who are familiar with Román’s earlier work of ana c. buena’s similar, if more mercantile, concerns. But here, from “Olla Común”:
Thus the march of the carbohydrates advances:
potato yuca bread yam rice lentil bean noodle
ready in parcels
then we count the rest
what spoils
what is perishable
what can be used to make broth or smoked
this is the rhythm
of the steam front
sweating we invent the day’s menu[13]
The quotidian, the care, the “stomached mouths” of ana c. buena are transformed into the militant act of the multitude, in which the march is care itself. The multitude is neither the not-yet nor the serial but rather an assembly, a gathering, a daily menu, a means of feeding the new arrivals, a means of eschewing name for a kind of recognition in the quotidian.
Similar concerns underlie poet Eduardo Yaguas’s Diario de protesta (2023), a serigraphed narrative of the protests told in woodcut stamps. Yaguas’s book departs from Román’s approach in its insistence on speed and on the repetition of production (it incorporates stencil and graffiti work), but it may also offer a useful way to shift to thinking about the marking of days, which Multitudes likewise references via some of its poems’ inclusion of dates in their titles. In the postscript to Diario de protesta, Yaguas notes that, given the speed with which events transpired, the act of keeping a journal, a diary (diario), is simultaneously a way of keeping track of the daily news (a diario is also a newspaper) in a country where the mainstream press hardly found the energy to give a winking shrug at the police’s violent repression of protesters. Yaguas’s method of making stamps to speak graphically to these realities is itself a kind of “daily menu” invented at the speed of the perishable. Yaguas’s work thus parallels Román’s in their respective attempts to evoke the velocity of the protests and their subsequent repression, but Yaguas more openly recognizes the subjectivity in the diario, even as the use of stamps effects a graphic uniformity.
After the Uprisings: Archive, Allegory, Anthology
The animating question behind all these works—El lenguaje es un arma de largo alcance, Román’s Multitudes, Yaguas’s Diario de protesta—is one that Patricia Espinosa broaches but does not explore in the article I’ve cited above: To what extent is political subject formation, even supposedly collective subject formation, still a narrative act? The horizontal continuity of slogan and sign in El lenguaje and the book’s outward lack of authorship allow for a collective character, but the underlying precipitant (the desire to protagonize the struggle) preserves a textual object that fixes signage in the democratic horizontality of the universally similar. The book thereby confuses metaphor and metonymy, as writing that might properly be a figurative expression of the struggle instead comes to stand in for the revolutionary movement and event. In this sense, El lenguaje and other texts fail to deliver on the key question: What might it mean to go beyond ephemerality and, as I hinted above, seriality, rather than being brought into the ossified space not of deferral but of absented prepositionality (post-)? Anyone in the US who saw signs gathered from the Occupy protests or the encampments on college campuses in 2024, and then saw these linguistic and material vestiges get adopted and preserved by various archival projects, has run up against the question of exactly what world these archives, these modes of preservation, are for. It seems, in fact, that the archival impulse is meant to presage the event rather than replay it, akin to the machine at the heart of Ricardo Piglia’s novel La ciudad ausente, a “narrating machine” that remixes memory into materialized plot in a holographic-projective point of view. The archive is a kind of route back into the event as possibility, replaying the capacity for another, possible, lost future. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, we might say that history “also needs … a material leitmotif, which might be a birthmark, a telltale word, or any other inconspicuous material sign
whose presence is enough to reassure us that history has a meaning after all.”[14]
While archival projects, including the Chilean Museo del Estallido and its related online archive, as well as other collections of zines and ephemera, do achieve a looser subversive relationship to authority than other forms of writing typically attain, they also tend to reproduce the fantasy of use-value presumed to spontaneously emerge from any given data dump. That is, the idea that power comes not from the end of a loaded gun or from the people but from a phantom body animated by these gathered ghostly pasts. This power can only be activated if we position ourselves within the archival project’s reconstruction of events—recording after recording of cacerolazos, another photograph of Plaza Dignidad—as though the archive somehow sought to reanimate or reactivate those scenes.[15]
The space and time after the uprisings have likewise produced a tendency toward anthologization and the presentation of an alternate understanding of events, as in the anthology N poemas peruanos de revuelta (2023), which ties together the heroic revolutionary period of the late 1970s (including writers like Cesáreo Martínez) and recent post-Estallido literature, as well as in zines such as Qantu y barricada (2023), which encompass a broader geographical swath of the country (instead of the generally Limeño crystallizations in broader literary dissemination and publication). These publications embody a protest literature that seeks to model or, paradoxically, invent a multitude that is representative of the very imagined community (however plurinational) that is frequently discussed as stemming from expanded literary forms.[16] Meanwhile, networks of communication outside literature continue to exist within protest movements (now more than ever), as Román makes clear in the lesson performed in Multitudes, a quasi-transcription of the changes to the life of the university and of the necessity of thinking the university as a space of refuge and care, as well as, tragically, a space under siege by state and capitalist repression.
In other words, many poetic texts following the Estallido and the uprisings in Peru attempt to use literature as a means of assembly and in turn understand literature as analogous to this gathered multitude. But analogy has a tendency to fall into the mapping of a public, the mapping of events in motion, of rapidly changing histories ossified in these sudden jolts. These sudden jolts, in fact, appear dialectically to have left the old power structure as entrenched as ever, as the following years have shown with stubborn and often deadly persistence: the constitutional process in Chile all but reduced to a trickle; Dina Boluarte still nominally in charge in Peru (albeit with a 3% approval rating at the time of this writing), while the extractivist kleptocracy continues to monopolize real authority. This means that the analogy being made in these post-Estallido writings is one that aligns the literary text itself with a revolutionary capacity on the part of the people, of the mass. This analogy returns the national, as an allegory of other regional or global struggles, to the level of the text. The poem or book (and not the multitudes) becomes the “world-historical individual” in Lukács’s (rather than Hegel’s) terms.[17] But exactly for that reason, such texts must simultaneously imagine this protagonicity as occurring outside themselves, in broader historical and material transformations. There is thus an ambiguity in many of these writings around the relationship of literature to historical change and actors, as authors alternately imagine their works to be provoking, documenting, or embodying the pueblo in its revolutionary potential.
The variety of contradictory approaches to analogy and allegory is especially remarkable when one compares a post-Estallido work like Pablo Lacroix’s Un oasis en el desierto (2020) with an earlier book such as Luz Sciolla’s Retratos hablados (2016). Despite apparent resemblances (principally, both are quasi-documentary works dealing with state violence), these are not by any means the same. Lacroix’s artist book gathers poems on the Chilean crisis together with attempts at rethinking then-president Piñera and others’ statements on the Estallido, bringing the project closer to the anthological and, thus, the historical. Sciolla’s book, a personal collection of articles highlighting acts of torture and repression from 1973 until 2017, understands state violence as an ongoing international and internationalist question that must be resolved both on the level of language (how these acts are justified, legalized, and reported on—and sometimes all of these at once) and on the level of solidarity in the open-ended archive. Sciolla’s project could go on, it seems, indefinitely. It is also metahistorical: Her process of selection and textual annotation parallels biography, and in this personalization, the book retreats from a properly historical condensation. In Lacroix, on the other hand, the event is a distinct object and, given the title, also a place, siting and thereby delimiting the scope of anthologization. Lacroix attempts to shuffle off subjectivity through recourse to the layout of a nationally oriented dossier, and thus the project both points beyond itself as a replicable method and also implicitly assumes the status of a poem about an event or occasion. Whereas Sciolla seems to invoke Benjamin’s ragpicker-poet, who must “come to a halt every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters,” Lacroix’s superficially similar (but again, post-Estallido) project is interested in the events of 2019 as a site of gathering, but also in the events’ crystallization into a historical immobility, though coupled with a pluralized, if curated, authorship.[18] Indeed, Lacroix notes in a short talk that readers should feel they are able to “participate” in the piece; they should “get involved.”[19] The project thus becomes a collective body, not unlike Román’s, determined by the author’s protest-pedagogy.
Still another model has recently been presented in poet Daniela Catrileo’s well-received 2023 novel Chilco. In Chilco, a thoroughly allegorical approach in post-Estallido literature comes into view in what, in the heyday of the World Social Forum, might have been called a delinking, tenuously sharing space with an understanding of political impossibility and a persistent damp, a mold that creeps into even the most precarious line of flight. The novel’s main character escapes the capital city “Capital” for the island of Chilco and for a degree of somewhat amorphous self-sufficiency linked to indigeneity. Ambivalence about a programmatic understanding of “the indigenous position” or the “Mapuche position” is at the heart of Catrileo’s perspective on the future of the Chilean state, which she does not recognize as her nationality. This, then, is the allegory at play: The text expresses the ambivalence of leaving Capital and, indeed, of the ability to do so—the island, as a spatial form, is recognized as an “escape,” but an escape that the protagonist first visits as a kind of depressing place for a vacation and as a place of alienation and anxiety. In this regard, the text models the fact of the 2019 Chilean uprising through thinly veiled allegory, while also suggesting the incommunicability of the future via the uncertainty of the event of the uprising itself (the novel’s city becomes a destabilized site, physically, with frequent sinkholes and structurally unsound buildings) and its narrative structuration (time and narrative logic become somewhat fungible and unclear). Catrileo overtly addresses this instability in a passage where the narrator speaks to the exhaustion of the city’s residents:
When the history books are written or a historical documentary is filmed, the events of an uprising are recounted. There’s talk of heroism, stories of great deeds and massive defeats; the country’s supposed heroes and great rebels are fictionalized in grandiloquent phrases. Facts about the number of deaths are provided, and biographies of the martyrs are printed. But nobody, absolutely nobody, says the resisting and fighting is exhausting.
We tried, I promise.
… Our grief was a beast with a multitude of heads, devouring our defeated hearts.[20]
Here, Catrileo envisions what we could call a literature of exhaustion—a tendency that is also present in Chilean poet Carlos Soto Román’s Tercera Estrofa (2023). This latter text manipulates and exposes the latent ideologies of the third verse of the Chilean national anthem, removed after the Pinochet years, which rather openly supports a military-nationalist death cult, and which has remained popular, unsurprisingly, with the ascendant far right in Chile. Soto Román’s other works—11 is paradigmatic—have likewise bound these sorts of material together.[21] But in Tercera Estrofa, he has written and erased, written and erased, this same stanza over and over again, each time offering a slightly different critique through the writing that remains after erasure, and yet each time seemingly necessitating the ghostly repetition. If El lenguaje es un arma spoke the language of resistance in its panoply of voices, then this palimpsestic overlay of the same announces the persistence of this verse and the violence it represents. Tercera Estrofa, like much of Soto Román’s conceptual writing, deals with an agonistic relationship to the past, in which its returns stick to the present in their incompleteness, or where the trench that defines the utopian island of historical amnesia is filled with cadavers hidden in language.
This island of historical amnesia, however, might also exist within self-avowedly comprometida post-Estallido writing itself. Repeatedly during the course of writing this essay, I have considered what it means to write on protest movements as they collide with broad political indifference and reactionary retrenchment. To what extent does this essay contribute to the extensive bibliography of defeat or, at the least, retreat? And, moreover, how do selection criteria inform the content of the work? Catrileo’s Chilco was published by Spanish mega-publisher Seix Barral and in English by FSG in the United States, which, while excellent for distribution, speaks to the concentration and retrenchment of capital in that outpost of what one might have once referred to euphemistically as “oppositional literature.” Similarly, Román’s Multitudes was nominated for the conservative newspaper El Comercio’s Premio Luces, which she turned down. Writing on Instagram, the poet noted that Multitudes was not a “rehabilitation of the so-called ‘militant poetry’; it is a document about our people’s struggles.… The fact that this book exists is a tragedy…With this in mind, I am surprised that Multitudes seems to have been nominated for El Comercio’s Premio Luces.”[22] And yet, as we have seen, there is an ambiguity in the book around where or what the subject of Multitudes is and who the multitudes (and the pueblo) are. Finally, several of these texts exist only as handsome editions with rather limited availability. Certainly, part of this has to do with the simple fact of poetry’s niche market and modes of distribution. Part of it has to do with writers’ need to receive compensation for their labor. And part of it has to do with the messiness of being part of a cultural Left that is beholden to intersecting and compounded political pressures within a nearly pulverized ambit of revolutionary possibility. That this is further compounded by several layers of mediation (and physical distance) as I mull these ideas from a gray New York, as the US slips further into authoritarian nightmare and institutional capture, goes without saying.
These questions and ambivalences will not be resolved here. If there are contradictions, they are for readers, critics, translators, publishers, and writers to wrestle with and to learn from. To close, then, I want to turn to a text that predates the 2022 protests in Peru but which speaks to a gallows humor that undergirds many of the projects I have discussed. An untitled visual poem by poet and designer Michael Prado reproduces the chain of Fujimorist command:
Keiko says
that Kenji told her
that Alberto told him
that he told you
that Kenji told him
that Keiko told him
that Alberto told her
that she told you
that Alberto told him
that Keiko told him
that Kenji told her
that he should tell you
not to say anything.[23]
Displayed, coincidentally, during the months of the 2019 Estallido in a gallery in Santiago, this poem is an object that ties the Peruvian and Chilean contexts together, speaking to the endless chain of corruption and legal machinations of Fujimorismo in Peru, only to end up in the vague threat (and legal strategy) of the final line. The ambivalence of the poetry of the barricades, then, remains locked in this poetic and political dialectic: Where do the pictographic chronology of Diario de protesta, the curricular revision of Multitudes, and the political future of ana c. buena exist in relation to the imposed demands for silence and exhaustion, the future of a restored tercera estrofa? This remains to be seen.
Notes:
The original print publication of this essay (in CR 68:2) neglected to acknowledge that Eduardo Yaguas’s Diario de protesta was published by Taller Editorial La Balanza in Lima, Peru.
[1] Patricia Espinosa H., “Aquí, Chile: literatura neoliberal y literatura post estallido,” Nodal, January 30, 2020, https://www.nodal.am/2020/01/
aqui-chile-literatura-neolibeeral-y-literatura-post-estallido-por-patricia-espinosa-h/, my translation.
[2] El lenguaje es un arma de largo alcance (Santiago de Chile: Libros del Pez Espiral, 2020), 1.
[3] El lenguaje, 53, 71, 65.
[4] Carmen Berenguer, “Feminismo y política,” in Por una constitución feminista, ed. Sofía Esther Brito (Santiago de Chile: Libros del Pez Espiral, 2020), 158–61.
[5] Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 16.
[6] Valeria Román Marroquín, ana c. buena, trans. Noah Mazer (Phoenix: Cardboard House Press, 2024), 77–78. First published Taller Editorial La Balanza, 2021.
[7] Román, ana c. buena, 25.
[8] Román, ana c. buena, 47, 29.
[9] Valeria Román Marroquín, Multitudes (Lima: Taller Editorial La Balanza, 2023), 20. All translations from Multitudes are my own.
[10] Román, Multitudes, 21.
[11] Note that, via the poem’s refrain and attention to its social and historical conjuncture, Román establishes intertextual references to both Cesáreo Martínez’s 1978 poem “Cinco razones puras para comprometerse (con la huelga)” (Five Pure Reasons [To Side with the Strike]) and Alejandro Romualdo’s canonical “Canto coral a Túpac Amaru, que es la libertad” (Choral Song to Túpac Amaru, Who Is Freedom) from 1958.
[12] Román, Multitudes, 21–22.
[13] Román, Multitudes, 27.
[14] Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (New York and London: Verso, 2013), 302.
[15] There are other ways of modeling the state form, such as works that seek to play with or push back against the constitution form, including Santiago Vera’s erasure of the Peruvian constitution or the volume Por una constitución feminista, cited earlier. The constitution form is often cited as a core issue in Chile and Peru, given the neoliberal guarantees these documents have offered, whether issued by Pinochet or Alberto Fujimori. Another alternative is found in Forensic Architecture’s project reconstructing police repression in Plaza Dignidad on December 20, 2019, using footage from a camera installed in the gallery space Galería CIMA in Santiago.
[16] Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and its discontents over the past forty years have framed this discussion in the Anglo-American sphere, while Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (2002) is the most frequent starting point in Latin American studies. In both cases, discussions of oral and visual language and the complexity of social forms—not to mention material culture, and literacy’s relationship to a plethora of imperial and, later, Cold War and postcolonial projects—have complicated both of these initial salvos. Recent work in Peru by writers like Luis Alberto Castillo, Mateo Díaz Choza, Rodrigo Quijano, Mijail Mitrovic, and others provides a useful problematization of publishing, poetry, and the graphic arts in that country. Likewise, critic Mirko Lauer’s texts on what he called the Teoría social del arte (from the early 1980s) helped to establish a not-dissimilar problematic.
[17] On the contrast between Lukács’s sense of the “world-historical individual” and Hegel’s use of that term, see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 30–63, esp. 33–40. See also Jameson, Antinomies, 263–69.
[18] Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 48.
[19] “‘Un oasis en el desierto’ lanzamiento de libro del estallido social,” YouTube, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, December 17, 2020, www.youtube.com/live/md8BBhvRz-o?si=IBQr1jdnVLr0ROxP.
[20] Daniela Catrileo, Chilco, trans. Jacob Edelstein (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), 89.
[21] I have elsewhere tried to understand 11 as a text about the afterlives of the Pinochet years as digitized discursive ghosts, as poet-scholar Astrid Lorange has done in her reading of Soto Román’s Chile Project:[Re-classified](2016). See Astrid Lorange, “Reading History Against the State Secret: Carlos Soto Román’s Chile Project: [Re-classified], the Remediated Archive, and the Poetics of Redaction,” Angelaki 27, no. 2 (2022): 17–29; and Judah Rubin, “Carlos Soto Román’s 11,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2023/January 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/books/carlos-soto-romans-11/.
[22] Valeria Román Marroquín (@valeriaromanm), “sobre la nominación de ‘MULTITUDES’ al Premio Luces de El Comerico,” January 31, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C2xNxbbOPMh/?igsh=dGJxN2plbHE1ZWhq, my translation.
[23] Michael Prado, muroescrito # 2, Autumn 2019, Galería Die Ecke, Santiago de Chile. The text was first published as a postcard insert called “eseoese–>poemas de auxilio.” See Pesapalabra, no. 2 (December 2018).