We just came across this photo that we had not seen until now in an article about the 35th anniversary of the
Centre Educatiu Esclat
, published a couple of years ago on the blog of the Fundació La Roda, which we link here.
The Centre Esclat opened its doors in Bellvitge (L’Hospitalet) in 1978, just three years before the historical moment that we will reconstruct in our scene. As the article explains, the center, founded by the Teresian sister Montserrat Ortiz, was opened with the intention of serving the large child and youth population of the neighborhood who «when they left school, the easiest thing to do was to hang around the streets».
The emergence of entities dedicated to the education and leisure time of young people coincides with the end of the Franco regime and the demographic increase that occurred between 1960 and 1975. It is evident that these institutions respond to a social emergency, but on the other hand we can also understand that they acted subsidiarily as governance devices that, on the one hand, reduced the autonomy of the child and youth population in the neighborhoods and, on the other, contributed to the control of possible outbreaks of social violence in a situation of economic crisis accompanied by a high rate of youth unemployment. To this must be added, as has been said on many occasions, the irruption of drugs in the mid-80s, which deactivated as a political subject a good part of an entire generation of young people in the urban peripheries of the Spanish state.
Of course, the principles, motivations and methodologies of this type of entity were not homogeneous, and so we can find different degrees of interest and effort in preserving that autonomy enjoyed in the late 60s and early 70s by children and young people in neighborhoods like Bellvitge.