In Nanterre, in the immediate periphery of Paris, were located until the beginning of the 1970's, France's most populated "bidonvilles" (slums), inhabited mostly by families from Algeria. There are today logically very scarce physical remnants of these slums: even the streets of the time were redesigned, and old inhabitants get lost trying to retrace their ancient paths of living. Only a few trees, planted by the inhabitants of the slums, remain. Nanterre has become an important piece of the development projects of the whole city-region of Paris, the major CBD of La Défense being in part on its territory. The pressure of the projects has been the occasion of intense conflicts between the city (led by a communist mayor) and the State, in which memories (versus discourses of modernity) where and are mobilized. But, even in this context of long time resistance and coalition building on the local level, there is no such thing as a consensual community's collective memory: parts of the population (mostly immigrants from north Africa) have long been excluded from the local memory building, making it a white (racially) and red (politically) memory. It is only very recently that this hegemonic narrative has been challenged by critical voices, particularly grounded on the excavation of the local memories of the "Guerre d'Algérie". Is it only to make place to a new hegemonic narrative? Or is there room for pluralistic and critical local memories?