The census of infra-housing of Madrid: files, photographs and control of the Madrilean chabolist polulation during the Franco stage

Abstract

The Census of Infra-housing elaborated by the Comisaría de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid and its Environs (COUMA) during the decades of the 50s and 60s of the last century, configures a privileged material archive to analyze one of the phenomena that most worried the Franco regime since the postwar period: the growth beyond its control of the urban peripheries. The arrival of migrant working families expanded the Madrid suburbs with the increase of thousands of self-built shacks. This article is based on an anthropological fieldwork in Vallecas, which has included an ethnographic reading of documentation from this period, especially the Census of Sub-housing. This file, practically unpublished, is made up of thousands of files, which collect information on each of the families that inhabited the outskirts, along with a photograph of them at the door of their shacks. Throughout this work, the configuration of the files is analyzed as “material evidence” of the presence of the shanty town, constituting a “documentary field” that was part of the control and surveillance policy to which said population was subjected. . We include testimonies from neighboring Vallecanoes who lived through this process, focusing on one of them through the photo-elicitation technique. The analysis of the Census of Infra-housing, a mechanism from which the COUMA exercised control and “material evidence” of this time, since the shacks were demolished, allows the reconstruction of the experience of an invisible population: the shanty town of Madrid in the Franco era.