Abstract: This article discusses the creation of a mural by the neighbourhood history workshop in a working-class district of Buenos Aires. The mural was chosen as a way of giving immediacy and visibility to memories of three distinct intervals in the history of the neighbourhood, the periods before, during and after military rule. In creating the mural, participants were able to re-establish some of the community solidarity lost during the era when community leaders were subject to repression and disappearance and give voice to some of the insecurities of the present. The mural portrays some surprising presences and absences in the collective memory of the different phases of the neighbourhood's existence and points to ways in which old and new members of the community can work toward a common future.How do people make sense of a past fraught with danger and contradiction? For the members of a history workshop in a working-class neighbourhood, one answer was to paint a mural. The mural, like the workshop that produced it, calls our attention to the difficult relationship between community and place in the Greater Buenos Aires neighbourhood called Jose Ingenieros. Much of the literature on memory sees working on the past as a way of getting at and thinking about collective identity (cf. Boyarin, 1994; Friedman, 1992a, 1992b). Workshop participants also saw the neighbourhood history workshop as a location where community might be remembered and thus somehow reconstituted and positively valued. In the attempt a group of neighbours engaged their past in a process and through images that provide a point of entry for considerations of popular memory on one hand, and the social constitution of place on the other.The SettingJose Ingenieros is an intriguing location from which to examine working-class memories of Argentina's last 25 years. The neighbourhood where I conducted field work in 1991 and 1992 is comprised of 2 500 apartments in four-storey blocks with a total population of about 15 000. It is located in La Matanza, the most populous of the formerly industrial and working-class boroughs which form a ring around Argentina's cosmopolitan capital. Most residents are domestic labourers, semi-skilled construction workers, pieceworkers, low-income wage earners or self-employed.An acute housing shortage set the stage for a squatter occupation of these apartments even before they were completed. Squatters were thus part of a moment of almost revolutionary effervescence surrounding the return of Peron at the beginning of the 1973 democratic period. The space they occupied was originally constructed as part of the National Plan for the Eradication of Shanty Towns, and some of the intended inhabitants were placed in the neighbourhood as well. In the time between the toma, as the takeover is known, and the military coup in March 1976, squatters organized for the completion of the unfinished apartments and infrastructure, and for official recognition. They went beyond these most immediate concerns, however, generating lively community organizations including a health centre and a mothers' child care cooperative.Things changed after the 1976 coup. There were disappearances: delegates to the neighbourhood council, political activists and doctors from the community clinic were among those kidnapped by plain-clothes military and police. The repression included other less horrific activities as well: there were censuses in which military conscripts surrounded the neighbourhood, searched apartments, checked documents and took people in for questioning. From 1979, the neighbourhood even had a military administrator. In general, poorer neighbourhoods were seen by the state as either a refuge for, or a hotbed of subversion. These experiences made manifest the ways in which the neighbourhood itself -- unlike middleclass neighbourhoods, I would argue -- was a target of suspicion.After 10 years of democracy, everyday concerns in the neighbourhood are drugs, crime and the physical deterioration of the buildings and infrastructure due to vandalism and neglect. …
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Aug 6, 2008
Michael R Adamson 
