José Joaquín Jiménez (1911–1946), a journalist in Bogotá, embellished his ostensibly factual crónicas policíacas (police chronicles) with outrageous fictions. Scholars have debated how these chronicles should figure in the history of Colombian journalism. Instead, I study them in the context of Alfonso López Pumarejo’s first government (1934–1938), whose progressive program was known as the Revolution on the March. Jiménez satirised Guillermo Valencia, the Conservative Party’s preeminent poet-politician, and employed a running gag about the theft of poetry by suicidal members of Bogotá’s lumpenproletariat to ridicule Conservative intellectuals’ fears about the Ministry of Education’s campaign to democratise culture. Jiménez wrote for a newspaper that endorsed the Revolution on the March, and his chronicles derided the reactionary presumption that to democratise culture was to desacralise it. Following José María Rodríguez García’s revision of Angel Rama’s theory, I contend that Jiménez helped to undermine “the reactionary lettered city” that dominated public life in Colombia during the first decades of the twentieth century. Also, while scholars tend to refer to José Joaquín Jiménez by the pseudonym “Ximénez”, which he adopted in 1938, I employ both his given name and his pseudonym to emphasise the transformation of his figure after the Revolution on the March.