UCLA

This dissertation considers how secondary school students in Santiago, Chile come into forms of political participation through social movements. It deploys linguistic anthropological methods to consider relationships between youth semiotic practices and institutional structures. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two socioeconomically segregated secondary schools—referred to as The Private School and The Public School—between 2016 and 2020. This research occurred against the backdrop of waves of student movements for education reform that began a decade prior, which helped created the conditions for an uprising in 2019 known as ‘el estallido social’ [the social explosion]. The estallido social resulted in democratic efforts to replace Chile’s constitution, which was implemented in 1980 under a military dictatorship.

The first two chapters describe sociopolitical context. Chapter One provides a historical account of Chile’s dictatorship (1973-1990), its neoliberal economic reforms, and student political movements against dictatorship-era policies since the return to democracy. I also introduce The Private School and The Public School research sites and outline my methods. Chapter Two describes the 2019 estallido social as a phenomenon of ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim 1912 [1995]), a feeling of emotional intensification and unity that occurs when a group of people participates in shared action. I provide an account of what happened in the first weeks of the estallido, and document collective effervescence by bringing together forms of art that were inspired by and helped to sustain participation in the social movement.

Chapter Three takes place during the first week of the estallido social in The Private School, an upper-class institution in a wealthy suburban neighborhood of Santiago. It examines conversations from a 2° medio [10th grade] Social Studies class about events and experiences related to the uprising. Data analysis highlights teacher corrective practices that consistently orient students’ attention to the language that they use to talk about the estallido. I argue that these discourse practices reflect students’ socialization into forms of professional expertise, and dispassionately objective stances, associated with the careers of technocratic elites.

Chapter Four takes place in The Public School, a working-class institution in the heart of Santiago. I introduce ‘protest contours’ to highlight a relationship between material features of language used by students to construct oppositional stances—pitch contours—and a collective memory formed around historical contours of state violence. The first part of the chapter examines 1° medio [9th grade] students’ use of pitch to construct affective stances in narrative accounts of police brutality experienced at a 2016 protest for education reform. The second part is based in ethnographic research that reveals The Public School students’ socialization into a historical memory about repressive tactics deployed during the dictatorship, which contributes to their understanding of contemporary state violence.