Ferran Amores Chaves analyzes the phenomenon of labor unrest in the industrial neighborhood of Poblenou during the period 1969-1978. It uses as a fundamental source a periodical publication of the neighborhood, “Quatre Cantons“.
The object of the present work is the study of the labor conflict lived in the companies located in the Poblenou, one of the most highly industrialized districts of Barcelona. The chronology is adjusted to the decade of the seventies (from 1969 to 1978), coinciding with one of the most turbulent and rapidly changing periods of recent Spanish history (both economic and political), in which the working class underwent great changes .
Taking as almost single source one of the most prestigious neighborhood magazines in Barcelona as it was Quatre Cantons (1973-1978), I have been able to develop a first outline of the political-labor struggle of the working class of Poblenou. Quatre Cantons was a monthly neighborhood magazine, not clandestine, supported by subscriptions and advertisements, and sold at newsstands. The journalistic task and the militant effort of its editors translates into a high presence of labor information regarding the companies in the neighborhood. The existence of up to 35 satirical vignettes related to the world of work has been a source of information not heterodox, less useful. The main source is supplemented by scattered documents from the same workers’ movement or neighborhood organizations, in the form of notes, sheets, etc., and four interviews with workers who were protagonists of some of the events narrated in the work.
The use of a neighborhood magazine as the main source for the study of labor conflict in the neighborhood of Poblenou in the seventies, has proved satisfactory to outline a first approach to the workers’ struggle. Based on the lack of studies on the workers’ struggle of Barcelona in the 1970s, many working-class neighborhoods of the city published magazines near Quatre Cantons (both in terms of content and chronology) and that Barcelona-city can not be understood (all ) without first attending to its neighborhoods (parts), it is proposed as an approximate method to the Barcelona labor conflict the systematic emptying of other working neighborhood magazines that, as in the case of Quatre Cantons and Poblenou, allowed to accumulate information and acquire valid elements for establish comparisons or generalizations of the parts (neighborhoods) between them and towards the whole (Barcelona).
