Emilio was nine years old when he went to see Candelaria with his mother, his neighbor on the Camino de Chasna, who had given birth. When he saw the baby in the crib, he immediately said: “I will marry this girl.” So it was. Fourteen years later, he asked his wife, Maricarmen, to be boyfriends and she accepted. He was 14 years old, but things were also very clear, so he put “his conditions” on him and one of them was that he did not go to drink alone at the wineries. “But I didn’t need it because I had the winery at home and the men came to drink there,” he jokes.
In the middle, specifically in 1957 and at the age of 26, Emilio Hernández Báez went to Venezuela because he wanted to bring 200,000 pesetas to buy a house. He did it because when he proposed to Maricarmen and that they move upstairs to his parents’ house, his wife refused because she wanted her own home. The only way to get it was to go to work in Venezuela, at that time, “a land full of opportunities.”
“I saw that a lot of people left and brought the money so I decided to try it in two years, although afterwards it took a little longer,” he says.
The family was not reluctant. His father had also gone to Cuba for the same purpose, so he repeated the same words he heard from his when he left: “You are already great and if you want to go I will not impede you, if I can help you, I will help you.”
He arrived in Caracas and worked building the Macuto Sheraton hotel, the chain’s first in Latin America and the Caribbean. Then he went to the state of La Guaira. He lived through the coup d’état of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and after this event he returned to Caracas and worked in the travel and removal company until a cousin who had also emigrated offered him to go to harvest onions in Lara state. In the last harvest he lost several kilos because it rained a lot in a place where it was not frequent and forced him to delay his return for almost a year.
Meanwhile, Maricarmen was waiting for him in La Orotava locked up in his house “because I couldn’t go to Mass alone in case some boy caught my eye,” jokes the woman.
When he returned, he bought a plot of land in Candelaria del Lomo, began to build and, as he had planned, the couple married and started a family with four children, Maricarmen, María Dolores, Emilio and Cande.
Emilio had learned to cook in the ‘military’, so in addition to running the family winery, he set up a still life under his house that he served with his wife and later joined by his children. A well-known establishment in the town that still bears his name today.
He has hundreds of anecdotes about food, because he was always “an eater” and wanted to cook, something “rare” for a man of that time. His mother and sister tried in vain to convince him not to, but he ignored it. What’s more, he also washed the dishes.
When he arrived at the barracks, in Las Palmas, there was a vacancy in the kitchen. He confessed that he did not know how to cook but wanted to learn. And since sometimes attitude is worth more than knowledge, they took it and immediately gave him the key to the pantry “and I was happier than if they had sent me home,” he says, laughing.
On one occasion he made a sauce, began to cut the meat and while peeling the potatoes he was “pecking” some meat. In a moment he realized that there was no more left. “I ate the meat of the entire regiment,” says happily. I didn’t really know what to do until the cook arrived and the only solution they found was to replace it with bacon. “I gave it five boils. He boiled it and removed the water and so on several times. My colleagues congratulated me on how good it was and I told them that it was a typical Canarian dish, ”he says mischievously.
All these anecdotes and more were collected in the book Historia de un immigrante, written by his daughter Cande, in which he tells the anecdotes and stories he heard from his father.
One day he decided to write them down so they would not be forgotten. He took notes by hand that he later transferred to the computer, but he never had time to put chronological order and string the stories together. The confinement did its thing and during the days of Easter last year, “in which nothing could be done”, it took up the book in which 90% is true, although a certain “literary license” was taken to make it more entertaining, he added “some invention” and changed the names of some well-known people.
He gave it to her on October 16, on her 90th birthday. She handed him the package but he didn’t realize it was her life story until he started looking at the photos. “It’s the book,” Emilio said, surprised. The cover was designed by Laura, one of her granddaughters, who is a graduate of Fine Arts. The best gift to summarize a unique life, full of emotions, which also symbolizes what many canaries lived in the middle of the last century.
Story of an immigrant is not only a tribute to his father but also to all the people who have gone through the same situation in search of a more prosperous future but far from their loved ones.
Cande was always proud of her father because he was ahead of his time, in which prejudices abounded. The couple had small children, the bar, Emilio had bought a van with which he distributed bread from two bakeries, fruit and vegetables and when he got home and saw his wife who was not enough with the four children He helped her without any problem with the housework, from eating to hanging clothes. And even today it continues to do so. “What are the neighbors going to say?” Maricarmen would say to him, but he didn’t care much.
His wife always wanted to study but couldn’t when she was young because she had to live in a time when women only learned basic accounts and housework. He always had that “little pain”. That is why when one of her daughters did not want to do it, she told them that “there is an advantage in studying to never depend on anyone”, and she thought that the best way to help them was to study with them. First, she took the childcare course with Maricarmen and María Dolores and they set up the Yacky nursery in a place next to her house and then the night high school, which Cande also joined. It came to second but could not finish because it coincided that his mother got sick and had to take care of her.
Emilio is not lacking in professions. He got his hands on whatever it took. You can boast that you worked in the fields, digging wells, breaking stones, in warehouses, building hotels, running a still life, handing out bread, fruits and vegetables, moving, and planting onions.
He always instilled in his children that there were no unworthy jobs but that what was unworthy was not being able to eat and live well. And he advised them to “do what they do, make it the best possible, with pleasure and enthusiasm.”
This man, very loved in the Villa and to whom someone once told him that he would not reach 45 “and yet I doubled them”, also boasts of having known his great-grandparents and great-grandchildren, in total, seven generations .
“But do you know what I’m most satisfied with?” He asks me. He does not even let me stammer and responds instantly: “From the fact that the new generations have all come from scholars, my children, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren,” I add.
