María del Carmen Candelaria García Fernández never celebrated a birthday because she does not know what day she was born even though the date appears on her national identity document as March 2, 1934. It was the date they gave her by chance, after a fire that occurred in the court – located then outside Domingo Izquierdo’s old banana packaging – and intended, according to her, to make any trace of its existence disappear.
It is stated that he is 89 years old, although it is not his real age either because the family book was also burned and he cannot spend “five months” with one of his brothers.
“I actually don’t know if I’m 83 or 84,” he says. Between jokes, a neighbor convinced her that it was good to be older to “get paid sooner” and so she settled this issue, without further questioning.
Carmita, as her family and neighbors call her, does not know how to read or write. She is a woman of the mountains, who has been “her school and her house.” There she learned everything she knows and it was also there where she always found the means to support her two children, Rosa María and José Luis, alone.
This neighbor from La Victoria de Acentejo was one of the protagonists of the virtual exhibition organized by the Network of Municipalities for Gender Equality of the North of Tenerife to honor rural women.
In his case, any tribute is insufficient. Carmita was born and lived much of her youth and adulthood in a society that did not know any type of equality, but she had no choice but to do the same jobs as any man in order to survive.
She was a single mother at a time when this meant social pressure and great rejection, although she never paid attention to any of that. She had more important things to take care of: that her children did not go hungry or have to go out to work from a young age, like she did. She was in charge of sending them to school and guaranteeing them an education, a right that in her case she did not have either because at the age of five she was already in charge of going to collect branches and lariats and gather firewood to later sell it. She did it barefoot, since the first time she put on canvas shoes they were size 34. She wore them to go to a party and immediately she took them off and put them away for the next occasion.
In her house there were ten siblings, of whom only two remain, besides her. An 82-year-old man who lives in La Palma, and a 92-year-old woman. The oldest was killed in the Civil War. “I still remember my mother’s screams when they came to tell her.” “Another one had pain in his leg and it left him lame, but then he got sick in the hospital and died,” he adds. A 21-year-old and a 28-year-old also died. “In my family we went through everything, but well, nothing,” she says.
They were very humble and many times, both she and her sisters would go out to the mountains early in the morning with an empty stomach because there was nothing to eat at home. They didn’t even have coffee. Sometimes there were a few packages of malt that her father would get up to grind in the morning with a chair. “God forbid we go through the same thing again,” she adds.
“Those were difficult times, in our mountains there was nothing to bring because everyone lived off the same thing and there was a lot of control,” remembers Carmita. He says that one time, walking along the summit road towards Arafo, “they heard some shots and shouting, so some of them went down a ravine, others down the road… I don’t want to remember, it was one in the morning on us. “The next day, and my mother looking for us and we were all scratched and we came with nothing, without any burden.”
That day was no exception. There were other similar ones in which, supposedly for breaking the law, the guards chased them and she was imprisoned up to three times “for going to the mountains in search of branches to eat. They came to look for us, we were in the cell during the day – which was located in the lower part of the Town Hall – and when night came they threw us out and took away the branches that we had picked to chop them and throw them to the animals. And so every time they caught us.”
A sheet as a warning
Their house was made of tile and their mother hung a sheet on a palm tree to warn them when there was surveillance in the mountains. “One day a guard knocked on the door and asked him to take her out of there and put her in bed because she probably wouldn’t have enough to cover herself,” she notes with a certain mischief.
With his brother Daniel, “who went blind,” and one of his sisters they went to sell firewood along the Iron Bridge, in the lower part of the town “for three dollars. They gave us each a penny and we brought something to eat because there was nothing in my house,” he says.
They found “bad” families, who made them wait to pay them while they ate “and we were starving.” But there were other very good people to whom “I hope the good things of God rain down there, on him and on his wife.” It refers to ‘Antonio the tángano’, who asked them to spread out the sack and gave them ripe bananas to take home after they delivered the firewood. “We came deprived with this,” he confesses.
He also remembers the owners of a bakery, a couple who asked them to stay until the bread was taken out “to see if any would burn and we would take it warm.”
Carmita loaded up to 90 kilos of coal to Puerto de la Cruz. One year she brought down a thousand forks from the mountain and carried on her head the rails for the Pasado del Santo water gallery, in Santa Úrsula, despite the hundred kilos that she said they weighed.
He spent eleven years going to Adeje to work on the tomato farms and staying to sleep in caves. She went up to the area of La Pólvora and from there she went by truck, which took nine hours to reach the south of the island. Her sisters, since they were older, were paid 15 pesetas and she was paid 13 because she was smaller. One day she asked the reason for this difference and the manager responded that in her case she did not carry boxes and since this task had an added cost, “I started loading so they would give me more money,” she points out.
María el Carmen lives in the same house in which she was born and that was transformed along with her. No one who has been there imagines that she could have once been made of firewood and her bed was a board.
Carmita fell in love with Antonio Sosa at a town festival but it was many years later when they were able to be together since their different economic conditions prevented it at first. “It was 5,000 pesetas against a woman who was starving,” emphasizes her daughter Yaya, who knows many stories about her mother because she grew up among older women, her aunts and grandmother.
However, with the help of her mother and siblings, she raised her children and made sure they did not lack anything. “I left their clothes ready for them to go to school and I went to the mountains,” she emphasizes.
First, “the female” was born, in 1964, and two years later, the male, who in the afternoon, after studying, accompanied her to look for pine needles.
Over the years the hardships decreased and the family bought a cow and raised it. Carmita got up at half past five in the morning, she milked her, and she went out to sell the milk. “With the money they gave me, she would buy a sheet or a blanket for my children,” she says.
The mountain took its toll on him at 52 years old. At that age they gave him a non-contributory disability pension. She has had surgery on both knees, she has a prosthesis on both. The doctor who treated her asked her what sport she practiced because she “has bones like a boxer.” Even so, until a few years ago she worked in her own garden, planting potatoes, pruning the vineyard and getting up at six in the morning to go to the mountains to look for pine needles for the goats and cabbage leaves for the rabbits.
“When I saw the movie Twelve Years a Slave I thought: “it’s my mother’s story,” says her daughter, who also always dedicated herself to the mountains, the fields and collecting chestnuts. It refers to the story of Solomon Northup, an intelligent black man who dedicates himself to music in New York who one day is set up and sold into slavery to work on the plantations of Louisiana.
Carmita has three granddaughters and two great-grandsons. Her photos are in the living room of her house and she shows them proudly. There is also a huge portrait of her with Antonio, who years later separated from her wife and went to live with her. They were together for 40 years. Her children were already older and in 2000 she gave them their last names. It was the 21st century and equality was no longer a utopia but a goal to be achieved.
