A Public in Search of their History: Visitors of an Exhibition on Spanish Immigration in France

This article studies the public visiting an exhibition on the Spanish immigration in France: what their motivations and expectations were, and how they perceived the exhibition. Apart for some visitors who came round for professional reasons, the public mainly went to this exhibition because they were closely related to the history it presented. Primarily, they were migrants, descendants of migrants, their close family members, or friends, being all in search of their history somehow. However, their visions and their interpretations diverged. In contrast, they converged on the fact that they did not consider this exhibition as an event contributing to the recognition of their history.