Guerreros, Panks, and the Soundscape of The Chilean Undercommon

• In Event: Sound Cultures and Popular Imaginaries

Abstract

In 1984, Chilean director Gonzalo Justiniano produces a documentary called Guerreros pacifistas that opened a view unto the counterculture and music of Punk Rock during the Pinochet Era. Almost 3 decades later, documentaries like PANK (2011) and Los peores de todos (2014) retell the history of punk rock music through Chile’s transition and concertación eras as the history of a subculture whose loud protest music lived in the margins of social spaces outside of both the mainstream of Chilean politics and the avant-garde of protest art. The punkers themselves identify as proletarian workers whose soundscapes rarely penetrated the public soundscape of Chilean music—they were an affective community, to use Leela Gandhi’s phrase with a soundscape hidden from public hearing, but with an inclusive affective power of protest and consolation. By studying these documentaries and a select few records from the era, I hope to advance the theory of the liminal soundscape: a sonorous imaginary exclusive to the hair salons, underground clubs, and proletarian public spaces of the era. The study of this liminal soundscape helps to understand how punk rock, anti-capitalist markets of circulation, and the spaces of the underground allowed for a type of space for political critique and strategic innovation in a Chile nearly totally evacuated of the potential for protest. Using Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of the Undercommons, I argue for the importance of the liminal soundscape as a an account of the historical intersections of silence, planning, and punk rock music.

Author

• Carlos M Amador, Michigan Technological University