Las bibliotecas públicas: entre el bálsamo para la barbarie y la felicidad sin bombillo

The distribution of public libraries in Bogotá is not accidental, this is the suspicion with which this research begins, which aims to investigate how district discourses on public libraries are appropriated in their interaction with members of communities located particularly in Ciudad Bolivar between 2016 and 2020. Based on the analysis of public policy discourse and plans of development and reading, interviews with librarians, BibloRed officials and library members, and ethnographic work from and in libraries it is possible to say that, first, libraries are part of an institutional project of a city that is articulated by a neoliberal and individualizing vision of reading and written culture in which peripheral areas are conceived as spaces to be developed or intervened through these practices. Second, librarians inhabit a liminal place that requires constant negotiation of their work between the institutional project, local communities and their own interests. Third, that members use and appropriate libraries with the intention of participating, sharing, chatting and being with others. Thus, the institution is a place that only makes sense in its practices based on relationships with others and where the individualizing vision of the book and reading have little place. Each of these points finds its development throughout three chapters in which three visions are interwoven: a territorial, an institutional and a cultural one to highlight the dynamics and asymmetries of power in a particularly situated context, an issue to which Cultural Studies and Critical and Social Librarianship contribute. Finally, it is concluded that public libraries are called to be part of the social struggle waged on the peripheries, as well as to be part of the particular worlds that their communities inhabit. In addition, notes are provided to rethink the current model of these institutions.