Constructing the City: Albañiles and the Transformation of Guadalajara, Mexico, 1950-2020, Brad Wright
This paper examines the role of albañiles in developing the city of Guadalajara, Mexico since the mid-twentieth century. Oral histories shed light on power relations, ways albañiles deflected attempts at subjugation by elites, and knowledges of the city and its spaces.
ABSTRACT: This paper presentation is part of a larger research program that seeks to better understand the heterogeneous lives and political cultures of Mexico’s poor majorities during a period (1970s-1990s) of capitalist transition to neoliberalism and supposed political democratization. The work and identities of albañiles—construction workers and general handymen—speaks to important issues of gender and class in the society. Like women household workers, many albañiles function as abusable servants of the gente bien, the latter addicted since colonial times to ordering around their supposed social inferiors. Elites behaved with a sense of ownership over the bodies, labor, time, and identities of albañiles and household workers. Albañiles built and maintained their own homes, family and neighborhood homes, businesses, churches and the homes of the middle classes and elites. They are also responsible for most of the built environment in the heart of the city and its most ‘modern’ buildings. In many ways, they know the city, its diverse landscapes and people, better than anyone. In this broad category of albañil, how have they experienced the city and its transformations across the transition to neoliberalism? They have been proud of their careers and work, indispensable for the affluent and the venues they frequent, yet exploited, denigrated, and even targeted with violence. How might we begin to chart history of this key multitudinous sector of the working and popular classes and their contributions to Mexicos cities and culture? And what do the lives and identities of albañiles in major cities tell us about the social and economic history of Mexico since the 1950s?
Lesbian Negativity, Collective Memory: Lesbian Temporalities in Digital San Diego Lesbian Archives, Guadalupe Ortega
Lesbians of San Diego, a digital archive focusing on lesbian herstory between the 1970s and 2000s, showcases the life story of the quotidian lesbians in hopes of preserving this herstory and figure in an inclusive and non-institutional format. Digital archiving of the quotidian lesbian helps create multi-temporal kinship relationships, thus establishing a connection between the everyday lesbian of the past, the present lesbian figure, and future lesbian potentiality.
ABSTRACT: To retain their memories, a San Diego older lesbian community established a digital community archival project, “Lesbians of San Diego,” to preserve lesbian culture. The 1970s and 2000s are considered the “prime” lesbian cultural time due to the many lesbian establishments and womin coming out as lesbians. LSD’s muse is the lesbian of the 1970s, an aging lesbian who wishes for memorialization before complete memory loss or death. LSD, much like lesbian community archives such as the June L Mazer Lesbian Archives and the Lesbian Herstory Archive, seeks material from the everyday lesbian in hopes of preserving this history in an inclusive and non-institutional format. A focus on the everyday life of the lesbian creates multi-temporal kinship relationships, establishing a connection between the everyday lesbian of the past and reuniting her with the everyday lesbian figure of the present. The everyday lesbian bridges the intimate, private, domestic, and the archive. By publishing interviews, photographs, scans, and other memorabilia in the digital space, LSD hopes to not “lose” themselves and their memories. This digital materiality and ephemeral material trace lived experience and performance to maintain structures of feelings after they have been lived. LSD’s interview structure allows the lesbian community to remember together as they search for the potentiality of past futurity. By reading through the LSD website, specifically its record of Las Hermanas Women’s Center and Coffeehouse, I analyze how San Diego lesbian archival kinship narratives persist thus illustrating a multi-temporal connection between the figure of the past lesbian and the present lesbian. This work seeks to sustain the yearning for lost affect and imagine ways in which the past and present can be kin. The lesbian disrupts straight/linear chronological timeframes to create a lesbian temporality that reaches back and forth yearning for lesbianism.
The Oral History of Kwang-Chow-Wan and Social Repair, Yizhen Li
The oral history of those who lived through Kwang-Chow-Wan, multiple stories, space cleaning, and social repair of the history of the French Concession during modern times.
ABSTRACT: I have conducted a long-term research on my hometown, ZhanJiang City (formerly known as Kwang-Chow-Wan), which is the only French leased territory in modern Chinese history(1898–1945). In contrast to the government’s silence on this historical period, the local residents develop their understanding of colonial history and comprehend how this history has shaped their identities, memories, and everyday practices in the post-colonial context.For the past eleven years, I have been dedicated to the oral-history research project and interviewed more than 200 people who have experienced Kwang-Chow-Wan. During this process, I realized the importance of adopting a holistic perspective and a local standpoint.The exploration of the relationship between social memory and political legitimacy, as well as the interactions between transnational encounters and local traditions. The publication Histoire Orale de Guangzhouwan: Un Territoire aux Narrations Plurielles（《口述广州湾》） was funded by Guangdong Provincial Archives of China in 2023.Social repair is a research topic in sociology. If we can't alter the external structure, we can use the internal elements to move forward. The oral history of Kwang-Chow-Wan had a vague and without purpose direction at first, just like I did when I first started doing it. I am just trying to resurrect fading memories, just like picking up the pieces of a puzzle. It is not possible for me to guarantee that their verbal accounts are comprehensive and believable historical facts, or that they adhere to strict logic. But in this incomplete puzzle, their trivial and humble life history can be completely connected with the grand narrative of big history. Moreover, Narration is a kind of restorative energy. The act of oral history is also shaping the micro-environment near us, making the abandoned real events and emotions compatible with society, making society no longer rigid and becoming more flexible and elastic.
