Joy of the countercurrent: The many carnivals in Santiago as spaces for reconstructing community

The present work reflects upon the historical evolution of the prohibitions, tensions, encounters, mixtures, desires and forgetting of various expressions of carnival in Chile. It also proposes an analysis concerning the configuration of practices that amount to the construction of a peculiar urban, secular carnival festivity in present-day Santiago. To this end, we will consider how these practices promote proposals and critiques that respond, as a countercurrent, to hegemonic cultural forms. The process at the center of the analysis occurs in three different moments, in which it encounters and articulates with contemporary social movements, and which we reconstruct “from within”, through a sociohistorical and testimonial perspective that does not negate our firsthand experience. We conclude that the many carnivals of contemporary Santiago operate as fundamental places for the social, political and cultural reconstruction of community ties.