Homeless people in Santiago, Chile: Identity and future

Abstract

In this article, the author attempts to describe the discursive representations of homeless people and their futures in Santiago, Chile, within the framework of the Critical Discourse Analysis. The text reports the results of ongoing research –Proyecto FONDECYT 1071094– that involves the use of eleven stories taken from a corpus of interviews of men living in Hogar de Cristo in 2005 plus nine other interviews carried out in the open diner of the Fundación Las Rosas in 2007. A qualitative analysis is performed using a diachronic method (Pardo, 2007). This allows a great deal of accuracy in the extraction of categories of the future from concrete utterances and permits the systematization of grammatical and semantic features with the purpose of facilitating the interpretation of issues such as family, work, street life, alcoholism, drug consumption, and especially the discourse break.