Beyond folk music: the social production of space through the cueca urbana in Santiago de Chile (2000-2010)

Abstract

This text resorts to the concepts of locality and neighborhood to explain how the Santiago’s cueca urbana music scene creates spatial events that go beyond the urban-rural dichotomy. It aims at demonstrating how this dance territorializes urban identity, thus creating a geographic memory rooted in neighborhoods. The text also aims to explain how performance is a means to criticize the current configuration of public space; through it, resistance is opposed to Santiago urban planning. The article starts by explaining the concepts of “locality”, “place”, and “city” and goes on to detail Santiago urban planning policies in the last half century, explaining the importance of places for performance and sociability, describing the importance of the concept of neighborhood and giving an example of the arguments above through a cueca event.

Keywords: cueca; space; identity.