RetroPauseEveryday life
Thematic archive · Everyday life

Everyday life and the small things that shaped the rhythm of the day

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1980s

From Newsstand to Album: What Changed in Spanish Comics Magazines

The magazine was a decisive way to read comics in Spain: it gathered serial work, gave younger artists space, and reached the newsstand. Between the boom in adult-oriented titles from 1981 to 1990 and their sharp decline in the 1990s, albums and other formats changed that publishing ecology.

1970s

Stickers, Packets and Albums: How Collecting Became a Shared Ritual

From stickers attached to consumer goods to albums sold in packets, the Spanish history of sticker collecting explains a leisure practice based on completing, trading and preserving. Panini’s international Mexico 1970 album helps locate a decisive shift: football turned an already widespread practice into a mass phenomenon.

1990s

Puerto Cristal: An Archive for Reconstructing Everyday Life in a Mining Camp

The Historical Archive of the Puerto Cristal Museum brings together documents on a Chilean mining camp from the 1960s to the 1990s. Its scope—school, radio, warehouses, laboratory, mine and processing plant—makes it possible to read work and domestic life as parts of the same historical context.

2000s

When a Photograph Becomes an Archive: Preserving Images, Safeguarding Contexts

Archives and museums do not preserve photographs merely as images: they safeguard their supports, descriptions, provenance, and links to the activity that produced them. Drawing on cases from Spain and Mexico City, this article examines why preservation, digitisation, and access are parts of the same cultural responsibility.

1980s

Museo Universitario del Chopo: Music, Archives and Underground Cultures

The Museo Universitario del Chopo opened in 1975, and its Information Centre and Media Library holds materials useful for researching musical cultures and practices. Available documentation places it as a landmark for Mexican underground cultures in the 1980s and as host to the first Tianguis de la Música.

Before 1950

Stickers: From Commercial Incentive to the Ritual of Completing an Album

Stickers did not begin as isolated toys. In Spain, the evidence gathered places their antecedents in commercial wrappers from the late nineteenth century, their spread through consumer products in the 1920s, and the sale of packets in the post-war period. This history explains why the album, the duplicate, and swapping form a cultural system of their own.