The Train as a Semiotic Space from the Perspective of Borderland Culture

Abstract

For many years, the railway constituted one of the main routes of access to Argentine territory for Bolivian migration. As a space of intercultural coexistence, the train adopts a system of codes that is resolved in a symbolic field where a border culture can be explained through the action of semiotic effectors. These effectors generate a universe outside of which certain behaviors cannot be explained, nor can the nature of the elements with which they interact.

This paper is based on Yuri Lotman’s theoretical construct of the semiosphere in order to explain border cultures, whatever interpretation may be given to that denomination. In this sense, it seeks to show how the space of the train, used by Bolivian migrants entering Argentina through the border province of Jujuy, constitutes a symbolic space in which its different semiotic categories—core and periphery, bilingual filters, delimitation, and transition—are resemanticized within a universe endowed with its own values.

On the other hand, the paper attempts to recover these configurations in the representations of the actors through their sociocultural testimony. From these objectives emerge connotations perceived in the social discourses of those involved, such as dispossession and loss of identity, which are nothing other than the loss of space and of its ethnic configuration.