Ciudadanías letradas: las bibliotecas populares. Formas colectivas urbanas en zonas consolidadas de la ciudad de Montevideo

Abstract

We present the results of an investigation about the urban collective forms in consolidated areas of the city of Montevideo, territorialities that result from a founding historical moment of our subjectivity. We carry out a series of ethnographic, multi-sited explorations, attending to the narratives and imaginaries that operate in everyday life, making focus on social situations that involve various collective. This is how we immerse ourselves in the daily life of two popular libraries that have already completed more than twenty-five years in emblematic neighborhoods of the capital. These spaces are carriers of cultural signs that defined a form of participation in contemporary Montevideo. Due to the accumulated political knowledge and collective memory, popular libraries are constituted as sources of symbolic power to be shared, disseminated and enhanced from community anchors. They imply the existence of spaces for critical appropriation of culture, insofar as they are not mere repositories of written material, but centers of creation and recreation sustained in an amplified education intertwined in daily life. Currently, with the advent of new information and communication technologies, the senses associated with these spaces are in full transformation, inaugurating new ways of inhabiting collective spaces.