Memory Politics on a Neighborhood Scale: Uses of the Past in the Historic Center and the Periphery of Valencia (Spain)

Abstract

This article analyzes the production of memory on a neighborhood scale, comparing the different logics that shape narratives about the past in the historic center and a peripheral area of the city of Valencia (Spain). We analyze the uses of the past developed by three kinds of actors: local institutions, social movements, and residents. This line of research shows that administrators boost aestheticized memories oriented towards commodification and tourist promotion in the historic center and towards an unconflicted representation of interculturality in the periphery. These hegemonic narratives are being reproduced, appropriated, and negotiated by social movements and local residents, who replicate some elements of the official narratives while, at the same time, resignifying other parts and claiming neglected and erased memories. Urban memories function, therefore, as a political arena for the imposition and negotiation of different dynamics and transformations experienced at the local level.