Miradores Populares, una etnografía a los procesos comunicativos en el barrio Jerusalén

Abstract

The doctoral research Popular Viewpoints: An Ethnography of Communicative Processes in the Jerusalén Neighborhood ventures into the urban margins of Bogotá to show that communication, in historically excluded territories, is neither a luxury nor an accessory, but rather a vital, political, and aesthetic act. In the Jerusalén neighborhood, located in the district of Ciudad Bolívar, communication sustains life, honors memory, and creates possible futures. The purpose guiding this work was to analyze the communicative processes that have taken place in the neighborhood since its emergence in the early 1980s until 2022, seeking to understand their dynamics, their mutations, and their capacity to produce community. Within this project, situated in the framework of critical ethnography, the research assumes the active participation of the community in the co-construction of knowledge while maintaining sensitivity toward cultural and affective dynamics. Fieldwork combined ethnographic observation exercises, popular communication workshops, community mapping, audiovisual production, ethnographic writing, and the epistolary genre as both a record and a mode of analysis. This praxis made it possible to identify and conceptualize Popular Viewpoints as an analytical–sensory device: starting from physical and symbolic places from which the community observes, narrates, and re-signifies its everyday life in relation to a city that often stigmatizes it. The findings reveal the centrality of social memory and community narratives in the construction of identity. They highlight the importance of organizations and social collectives (Fundación Social, Batuta, Melcocha, and Pauminga), which enabled the creation of intergenerational bonds and processes of territorial appropriation. In this way, the articulation of digital tools and living archives emerges as a strategy for visibility and civic participation, underscoring the emergence of ethical and aesthetic subjectivities that constitute forms of micropolitical resistance in the face of urban exclusion and media stigmatization. At the theoretical level, the thesis engages with critical ethnography, popular communication, and situated knowledge, showing that knowledge is produced through affect, collective experience, and lived practice. Methodologically, Popular Viewpoints are proposed as a hybrid device that integrates observation, performance, cartography, and audiovisual documentation, offering a replicable model for social research in peripheral contexts. In conclusion, the research demonstrates that Jerusalén is not merely a neighborhood marked by economic hardship and structural violence, but also a territory of symbolic and political potential. There, communication emerges as a living practice: an ecology that interweaves social networks, everyday conversations, and community cultural expressions. In the face of forgetting and stigmatization, the community narrates itself, recognizes itself, and projects itself forward, reclaiming its right to the city through collective action and popular creativity. In the neighborhood, what is produced is not silence, but embodied words, memory, and creation.