We are resuming the History Workshop of the neighborhoods of La Bomba, Can Pi, and La Cadena,
now every Thursday from 6 to 8 in the afternoon at the Centre Cultural Bellvitge-el Gornal, starting next Thursday, March 2, with this space dedicated to recovering the memory of the shantytown neighborhoods of
L’Hospitalet. If you want to contribute your testimony and collaborate in writing a history of the informal city in L’Hospitalet, stop by the Centre Cultural Bellvitge-el Gornal (
here’s a map).
Why recover the memory of the shacks?
The history of shantytowns has been omitted for decades; this has been considered an irrelevant and embarrassing episode of a very distant past that we should forget. However, we can understand the history of the shantytowns as a history of struggle for dignity led by the most impoverished social groupsand at the same time recognize the value of the men and women who contributed significantly to building the city we inhabit today. The CICdB aims to reintroduce the memory of the shantytowns into the public sphere and the collective imagination.
What have we done in the history workshop so far?
To date, we have made a map of La Bomba and part of Can Pi in which we have located the families who inhabited these neighborhoods from 1955 to 1976; we have digitized a significant number of photographs and documents that will form the future archive of the CICdB; and we have launched issue 0 of the CICdB newsletters, which you can consult
here—and issues 1 and 2 are in preparation.
What is a History Workshop?
History workshops appeared in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s as a movement promoted by Ruskin College Oxford, which proposed to democratize History and give rise to a history written ‘from below’ by the people. The History Workshop is a meeting place to think and write history together.
