Through the revisit of a previous study, conducted in 1980, the present research inquiries, in 2010, the relationship between economic and social circumstances, territorial rootedness, and temporal experience among the workers of a Portuguese industrial community. Interlocking ethnographic observation, biographic interviews, and extensive survey, the research explores the inflection, occurred between 1980 and 2010, in the interpretation of historical change spread among those workers, especially the transformation of their retrospective vision of the past dictatorial regime of Estado Novo (1933–1974). The research brings, therefore, a contribution to the study of the schemata of temporal perception and interpretation used in a particular community, pointing especially to the verbal and emotional expressions that constitute there the remembrance of the past. Nostalgia or melancholy emerges, thus, as expressions introduced by the changes on the local systems of expectations and opportunities of the community and, simultaneously, as personal and collective tactics used to cope with the present situation through the rehabilitation of the memory. At the same time, this article shows the pregnancy in revaluating or reproducing preceding researches, in the original or similar sites of inquiry, with a reflexive posture regarding the situated production of knowledge.