THE TRAIN AS A SEMIOTIC SPACE FROM A CULTURAL FRONTIER LOOK

Abstract

For many years the railway constituted one of the main ways of access for Bolivian migration to the Argentine territory. As space of intercultural coexistence the train adopts a code system that resolves into a symbolic field where a culture of frontiers explains itself for the action of semiotic operators which are going to generate a universe outside of which certain ways of behaviorism cannot be explained and together with them the nature of the elements with which they interact.

This paper relies on the theoretical construction of semiosphere stated by Juri Lotman to explain the culture of frontiers from any interpretation that one may have of such denomination. In this sense it is pretended to show how the scope of train space used by Bolivian migration that came into Argentina Through the bordering province of Jujuy constitute a symbolic space in which its different semiotic categories (nucleus and periphery, bilingual filters, delimitation, transition) are retransformed semantically into a universe with its own values. On the other hand, it tries to rescue its configurations in the representations of the actors by means of their sociocultural testimony. Connotations are derived from these objectives such as dispossession and loss of identity perceived in the social speeches of the people involved which mean the loss of space and their ethnic configuration.