Memories that reveal the history of an industrial neighborhood in the city of São Paulo

Abstract

The history of urban space is not usually told from a popular point of view, relegating to the background the experiences, practices and perceptions of the city of this segment of the population. This article looks at the experiences of two leaders, one living in a workers’ village built by an entrepreneur of the textile industry in 1917 and another in a housing development built by a community task force during the 1990s, both located in the expanded center of São Paulo. It attempts to expose the webs that entwine the memories of the urban space with individual memories and the strategies used by individuals to preserve landmarks of their personal history and the history of the groups to which they are connected, even through memory erasure processes. Thus, they ensure the preservation of the history of the neighborhood and of the city itself.