(Re) voltes: the festival of popular memory of the neighborhoods

The Cordoba Jose Tapia Bujalance, teacher of the Freire school and anarchist disseminator, was one of the promoters of the pedagogical revolution in Mexico, where he went into exile after the war and where he is remembered as “a true worker in education.” From 1934 until it was seen forced to leave the country, Tapia Bujalance was a beloved teacher at the Bon Pastor school, where he edited together with boys and girls from the neighborhood the bilingual magazine Vilabesòs (it was the first Spanish teacher to use the printing press in his work with children). A plaque placed in the row of ‘cheap houses’ that remains standing in this peripheral neighborhood of the district of Sant Andreu reminds you, as it will remind you this Saturday (Re) vault of the Good Shepherd, one of the 30 (Re) turns that this weekend drives Omnium hand in hand with a network of neighborhood and social organizations from all over the country, Sant Adrià de Besòs a Hospitalet de Llobregat.

The meeting point at Bon Pastor is the metro station, “means of transportation that did not reach the neighborhood until 2010& rdquor ;, remember Aritz Garcia, member of La fàbrica, community development cooperative who works in the rehousing program from the neighborhood to accompany families in the process of change and try to ensure that abandoning their old houses for new flats does not mean losing neighborhood networks. Her (Re) volta propels her, hand in hand, The factory and the memory committee of the neighborhood association, which is actively working on the future museum of workers’ housing in Barcelona in the place, after the plaque to the anarchist master.

The route through the Bon Pastor it will have three leading voices; those of Mari Àngels Janer Munueva, Núria Jover and Rosa Maria Muñoz Nuevo. The former, a lifelong neighbor of the ‘cheap houses’ and a market paradist in her youth, will remember her years at the fish market and the community life that was generated around her. Your neighbour Jover, born in 1931, will explain how the war and the postwar period were lived in the neighborhood; and Muñoz, who was a worker of the Fabra and Coats -‘La Mamella ‘, as everyone knew the factory, which at its peak had 3,000 workers-, will narrate the harsh working conditions of the women of the time. “It was a factory where mainly women worked, but when they had two or three children they left work outside the home, and in the end the history of Fabra i Cotas has always been explained by men, like the rest of the stories, and that’s another of the things we want to break with these (Re) turns”, apunta Garcia.

The self-built city

Another of the 30 Catalan neighborhoods that this weekend will join the (Re) voltes is the Carmel of the hawker of the last Mercè, Custodia Moreno, who will be one of the voices of the route. “The walk focuses a lot on explaining the phenomenon of self-construction. The history of the barracks is more studied, but that of the self-construction, not so much & rdquor ;, points Cristina López, member of the collective of architects El Tinglado, deeply rooted in this steep neighborhood of the district of Horta-Guinardó, and the driving force behind this route, which narrates the self-built city, framing it in the context in which it occurred: the different waves of migration and the lack of a public housing stock, that great evil still unsolved. The route ends in Green Floors, where Moreno Custody will remember his fight with Francisco Rosales, who was very active in the neighborhood association in the moved 70’s.

At the same time as the appointment in the Bon Pastor metro -This Saturday at 10.30 am-, at the other end of the metropolitan area, another group of people will meet at the bus stop. Can Serra, in L’Hospitalet and another in Can Vidalet, in the same city, all following the same logic of “revolutionize living memory building the common history& rdquor ;. “This is about build the country from the polygon. The first lesson is that democracy was conquered from the polygon& rdquor ;, points out Manuel Domínguez López, president of L’Hospitalet Study Center.

The objective of this marathon of memory vindication walks through the country’s neighborhoods is to “recover and revalue the everyday and popular history of the collectives, places and protagonists underrepresented in the story and the collective memory; reinforce the associative and community fabric of the country from the interaction, the mutual knowledge and recognition“, they point out from the organization of some routes that are not only for internal consumption. It is not only about knowing the history of your own neighborhood, which of course also, but of neighboring neighborhoods (or not so much).

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Learn from the past

This sort of festival of the popular memory will also tour the millenary Rec Comtal as it passes between Vallbona (Nou Barris) and Can Sant Joan (Montcada) and will review the memory of La Prosperitat (Nou Barris), hand in hand Centennial Commission; from La Mina (Sant Adrià), Sant Roc (Badalona) or from Verneda, where they propose a neighborhood journey from the origins of Sant Martí de Provençals to the first migrations from the 1940s to the early 1970s, “reaching the solidarity social struggles that for decades make life possible in a complex and difficult territory“.