Épicas ordinarias: Espacios de catástrofe y discursos intelectuales en México, Puerto Rico y Chile (1985–2005)

This dissertation is a comparative study on the relationship between spaces of catastrophe, intellectual discourses, and everyday life within the neoliberal context (1985–2005) in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Chile. Through an analysis that considers a combined series of literary and cultural materials, such as essays, crónicas urbanas, autobiographies, songs, and architecture, this comparative study demonstrates how the Mexican Carlos Monsiváis, the Chilean Pedro Lemebel, and the Puerto Rican Josean Ramos are three examples of a new kind of mass-mediatic public intellectual who addresses everyday life experiences and popular memories so as to speak and listen to a an affective we. Each one of these three intellectuals reflects upon a specific space of catastrophe—the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the feeble transition to democracy in Chile during the 1990s, and the aggressive U.S. military recruitment of Puerto Rican soldiers post-9/11—as a way to develop an intellectual discourse critical of the material precariousness in everyday life and its limitations to the public sphere within the neoliberal social space. Monsiváis\u27s crónicas in various newspapers and magazines (1985), Lemebel\u27s radio program Cancionero (1994), and Ramos\u27s journalism in the newspaper Diálogo (2000–2002) are intellectual actions, that is, immediate reactions to the crisis. Their urgent narrations of everyday life experiences dealing with the critical context allow these intellectuals to speak and listen to a wider and more heterogeneous public. Years later, these intellectual actions become intellectual thought through their historical reflections on the same critical events published in books years later. In Monsiváis\u27s essays in No sin nosotros (2005), Lemebel\u27s crónicas in De perlas y cicatrices (1998), and Ramos\u27s autobiography Antes de la guerra (2005), the intellectual discourses interweaves their voices with the voices and memories behind the everyday life experiences they had narrated years earlier. Through this double intervention—the immediate action and the historical thought—each one of these intellectual discourses proposes an affective we which is open and fluid and which challenges rigid national and cultural identities