This article focuses on the criticism of Chilean everyday life in the writings of Joaquín EdwardsBello.The first part concentrates on important aspects of urban chronicle as a genre associated to its journalistic origin, structure, readership, and the conditions of Chilean modernity atthe beginning of the 20th century. Supported by a brief corpus of chronicles, the second partof the article attempts to defi ne one essential feature present in Edwards's criticism: namely a criticism of both a specifi c and uninterrupted mode in which power has been imposed on the Chilean society effecting extreme forms of polarization and the ideological discourses that "naturalize" its presence.