“Since its birth, the city’s coat of arms was the expression of a Spanish and mestizo human community, which is what La Laguna has been and must continue to be. Unidas podemos has not been able to directly state its reasons for opposition, but it has struck me that a person who aspires to preside over the Laguna City Council has such a disdainful attitude and is unaware of the symbols and traditions of the city that must be preserved. CC voted against it in order not to recognize the illegality committed in its day, by way of fait accompli, by Ana Oramas and I imagine that United We Can from a crypto-independence position that Rubens Ascanio represents very well”.
The Laguna councilor Santiago Pérez has explained his motion to restore the use of the official shield of La Laguna (eliminated by means of fait accompli by a Government of Ana Oramas), which was rejected by the Canary Islands Coalition and Unidas Podemos in the last plenary session, presented it in defense of the identity of La Laguna.
“La Laguna is a human community, city and municipality, with deep historical roots. It can be said that the beginning of the island’s history, which resumed with the conquest or incorporation of Tenerife into the Crown of Castile, was La Laguna. And it has its symbols of identity that make up its cultural heritage”, he begins by saying.
One of them, the shield, is very relevant to the Local Regime legislation, which establishes that only the Plenary and by an absolute majority can make decisions about it, and that it must also appear in all the official documentation of the City Council and in other dimensions of city life.
La Laguna has a shield granted by Queen Juana de Castilla in 1510, in response to a request formulated by the new city, recently created, in whose foundation there were, according to the Synods of Bishop Vázquez de Arce, one hundred residents: 50 Castilians and 50 Guanches… “La Laguna is therefore, since its foundation, a human community of mestizo nature and personality composition,” he adds.
In this sense, the special commission of studies constituted in the City Council that ruled in 2004 that the shield has a high sense of mixture of races of cultures is expressed: “in addition to the symbols of the crowns of Castilla y León, there is Saint Michael the Archangel and the “Theydan”, the mountain that for the Guanches had deep meanings, even religious, because Guayota, the evil spirit, lived in its depths. Thus, the city’s coat of arms was already the expression of a Hispanic and mestizo human community, which is what La Laguna has been and should continue to be”.
Thus, the motion demanded that the Plenary Order the restoration of all official documentation and in all institutional manifestations of the municipality of the coat of arms that granted the city the Crown of Castile. However, the Plenary approved, with the votes of Coalición Canaria and Unidas Podemos, an amendment that referred to the use of logos and brands, without any legal, political or symbolic relationship with the city’s shield.
“I imagine that CC has voted against the elimination of an illegal practice imposed by Mayor Oramas to keep her absent and try to plunge these events into oblivion,” he says.
“And I believe – he continues – that Unidas podemos has a hegemonic orientation in La Laguna, represented by Rubens Ascanio, who is a crypto-independentist: they are but they do not dare to say it. And it would be nice if some of the arguments that Ascanio slipped in his speech would have been reflected in the amendment. I am respectful of the independence ideology; but in the times we live in, as the great historian of the 20th century Eric Hosbawn reminds us, the great transnational powers, which condition the lives of human beings without any type of control, prefer small, dwarf States, incapable of exercising a minimum of sovereignty in defense of its citizens”.
Santiago Pérez considers that the Canary Islands, if they were an independent State, “would be incapable of exercising a greater share of sovereignty than the one it exercises integrated into the Spain of the autonomies and through it in the European project”. And he also recalls that “there are influential elites who would not care if the political regime in that State was or was not a democracy in order to guarantee their hegemony over the government institutions of that hypothetical independent State.”
In addition, from “the most absolute emotional identification with the aboriginal past”, he recalls that “our aborigines had a society organized in a similar way to feudal Europe. It was not an idyllic paradise, from the social point of view it was a society halfway between the tribal and the feudal, with a structure in which a part of the aborigines was subject to relationships that we could call servitude, slavery or personal subjection”.
Pérez concludes that “United we can not have been able to directly present their reasons for opposition, but it has shocked me that a person who aspires to preside over the Laguna City Council has such a disdainful attitude and is unaware of the symbols and traditions of the city that he they should keep.
