The Lagunera Plaza de la Concepción, where Rafael Arocha Guíllama was born and played in 1878.
Rafael Arocha Guíllama, as described by critic Jorge Rodríguez Padrón, is one of the most significant writers of the early 20th century. In his own words, “I was born on 17th November 1878 in the house marked with the number 2 in Plaza de la Concepción in the City of San Cristóbal de La Laguna.” In the City of the Adelantados, he developed the majority of his creative work. After spending a decade in the seminary without a calling, he dedicated himself to private tutoring and journalism. He balanced this last task with literary creation and various public jobs. He worked in the office responsible for levying Real Rights taxes, attached to the Property Registry, in the Consumption Office, and in the Town Hall of La Laguna.
Arocha Guíllama contributed to numerous newspapers of the time, such as El Noticiero Canario, El Pueblo Canario, La Prensa, Gaceta de Tenerife, Las Noticias, and La Tarde. Some of his articles, penned under the pseudonym Ramiro, were particularly controversial. As he noted in 1939, in the Autobiographies of Writers and Artists of the Canary Library, “Many of my articles caused a stir back then. I suffered from an iconoclastic fury, and there was a journalistic edition that sold out.”
In his early days as a journalist, he faced two legal battles. The first was due to an article titled “Resurrexit,” published in El Noticiero Canario, which was accused of containing “tremendous blasphemies.” The second case, which resulted in a stint in prison, a resignation from the director of El Pueblo Canario, and a clash with the newly founded Gaceta de Tenerife, concerned the death of a parish priest from the village of Fasnia. In this article, Ramiro provided details about the alleged licentious life of the priest and speculated that the death might have been a suicide.
Despite these challenges, Arocha Guíllama’s journalistic activity continued through the following decades. He described himself as “shy and withdrawn, a true savage with all the hair of the deresa, as my good friend, the old journalist Don Patricio Estévanez, would say.” His life was filled with tribulation. In fact, he recalled, “My life in the City of the Adelantados glided between two madnesses: one involuntary, that of my birth, and another voluntary, which led me to the asylum.” This second madness resulted in several years at the Provincial Psychiatric Sanatorium, from which he was discharged in 1935. His life was solitary, and he explained why he never found love or started a family:
“My natural shyness and a disastrous prejudice—an incorrect idea about the physiological act—prevented me, after some innocent attempts in the blooming years of youth, from approaching a woman with the intention of creating a home. I did not know how to integrate into another family, to mix my blood with another’s. ‘I inhibited myself’ and isolated myself in solitude for many long years, wasting my energies uselessly. Curse that prejudice, which was the reason the axis of my life was warped—an axis around which everything revolves in this earthly existence!”
