Childhood memory in three generations of Mexico City in the twentieth century: from the word said to the recovered memory

Abstract

Oral history has not been sufficiently inclined to recover the memory about childhood and childhood memory, despite the cultural significance that is recognized in this field of research. Notwithstanding that this discipline has become a privileged window to recover the history of the subaltern groups. The purpose of this text is to recreate the childhood experiences between members of several generations of Mexico through oral testimonies. The protagonists of contribute with their stories to illuminate a fragment of childhood history in Mexico. Both lived for much of their childhood in Moderna Colonia, located in the limits of the geographical center of Mexico City. The territory where they develop their childhood life was founded and expanded in the late 1920s and early the following. In those childhood memories, he recalls to boys and girls who were born and grew up in a city that redefined its contours as a result of the urbanization processes that produced different places and multiple panoramas that outlined a new architecture that intermingles a city and strong traditions that take root in the rural world and the birth of a megalopolis. The territory where they develop their childhood life was founded in the late 1920s and early the following. The questions that guide this text are: How and what is remembered? how is the individual story(s) organized and how, based on these, a collective narrative is recreated, social memory is made insofar as it is representative of a specific social group and at the same time it can be a history of a society, in particular of children's culture?