The Unidad Popular is a period where there was a deep reflection on culture and its interdependence with the political-social changes. After a first moment, during the period of the electoral campaign and a year after starting the implementation of a national project on the road to socialism, the discussions on the role of culture in this process intensified and whose resonances went through positive balances to strong criticism, especially the danger of recognizing culture only as a means of disseminating something that is done elsewhere, of an instrumentalization of its practices. This paper aims to analyze this discussion in two political-cultural journals that opened their pages to their understanding. In effect, both La quinta rueda and Cuadernos de la Realidad Nacional (also known as Cuadernos del CEREN) constitute critical frameworks from which we can better observe the diverse and heterogeneous discourses that not only manifest the heterogeneity of voices that circulated, but also the theoretical and reflexive intensity of this era.