He walked towards utopia without discouragement, without slowing down to gain momentum or looking back. Without ever trembling in that vital journey of vindication and militancy that led him to embrace and defend freedom, politics, teaching and theater with unwavering passion and commitment. All this from her persistent militancy in a critical gaze that never faltered and that she projected from any stage she appeared on: as a councilor, teacher, activist or actress. He was always there, not in the spotlight, but on the front line.
Isabel Tejerina (Mieres, 1949) left the scene permanently yesterday. He reached the sky that his generation fought so hard to attack, long before the wave of rebellion of 15M. Hardened in the post-war mining environment of Mieres, her birthplace, in a large family of eleven siblings, a doctor father and a mother with strong religious convictions who emancipated herself from work during the dictatorship, Tejerina seemed to have inherited the revolutionary spirit of the October region of the 34. His adolescence and youth in Oviedo was “a succession of discoveries and ruptures with the ideas he had received, until reaching atheism from one day to the next,” he confessed in an interview with the Legado Cantabria project, which preserves his vital testimony. narrated in first person.
In reality, Tejerina always wanted to be a journalist or a doctor. But he didn’t have the opportunity, because in Oviedo there were no such degrees. “Don’t you like reading?” his father asked him. “Well, study Philology, there is that here.” Later she would end up acknowledging that she was very happy with her teaching vocation, first in secondary education and then at the University of Cantabria, training teachers, where she was a teacher of Early Childhood Education and retired as a professor of Didactics of Language and Literature.
At the University of the 70s he joined FELIPE, the Popular Liberation Front, very early in 1969, which was an anti-Franco leftist circle initially formed mainly by intellectuals. “When it reached the ears of one of my brothers that I “I went up on a platform to give a rally, we threw pamphlets or held bull runs and illegal assemblies, I had a lot of problems at home,” Isabel herself recalled. “One, for breaking the tradition and the ideas they had, and another, for fear of arrests.”
Torrelavega was, at 22 years old, her first assignment as a teacher. She only lasted three years there because the director of the Besaya Institute fired her for leading the protests of the PNN, the non-tenured teachers who went on strike because they were not paid and because they did not have job security. She ended up leading the movement at the state level as coordinator of the Cantabria institutes.
Later he moved to Santander and entered the Teaching School. By then she was already active in the Communist Party of Spain, which was later called the Workers’ Party of Spain, the PTE, of which she was general secretary. Those were times without the right to strike, or to associate, or to meet: “We did everything clandestinely and I also combined it with militancy in the party, which I was alone in Cantabria at that time,” he explained in an interview.
Isabel Tejerina was the woman with the greatest prominence and leadership in Cantabria in that first political line and also the first woman in democracy to become a councilor of the Santander City Council, when she headed the municipal candidacy of the PTE. His confrontations with the then mayor, the controversial and controversial Juan Hormaechea, were epic. She did not flinch in the face of his strong character and publicly denounced the arbitrary awards that, apparently, sowed municipal decisions with arbitrariness at that time. “We were idealistic, dedicated and generous. We fought a lot against the dictatorship, we did our job even though others later took the medals,” he recalled about those times.
We were idealistic, dedicated and generous. We fought a lot against the dictatorship, we did our job even though others later took the medals
Isabel Tejerina
He was on the City Council from 1979 to 1982. He did not manage to finish the term. A few months before, Hormaechea and the Alianza Popular councilors expelled her from the City Council due to a sentence, which was not final, that disqualified her for having been involved in the occupation of a social housing that was empty. Even in that she was a pioneer, rebellious and brave. It happened in 1979. A family with three very young children occupied a municipally owned apartment in Plaza de la Leña that had been empty for ten years. When the judicial eviction order arrived, members of the party and Tejerina herself were there to defend the family.
“The police came in and beat us all down the stairs. They imprisoned four people and prosecuted eleven of us. They released me that night because my daughter was a two-month-old baby and the commissioner, with a lot of pomp, with a very paternalistic tone and very cool, let me go,” he narrated about that episode. It wasn’t the first time it happened to him. She was detained on twenty occasions, but only once in jail with some women who worked as prostitutes in Laredo with whom she became friends. They immediately released her because she was a well-known woman, a teacher at the School of Teaching and a representative of her party.
She participated in the seed of neighboring associations such as La Encina, and feminist organizations to help women. At the University he formed the association ‘University and Solidarity’, together with Milagros Gárate, among others, which for 17 years developed more than one hundred cooperation projects in the third world thanks to 0.7% of the salary of 150 professors and university staff. An organization that, when its promoters retired, was dissolved due to lack of replacement.
Literature and theater were a great passion for Isabel Tejerina, who in recent years, together with her friend and colleague Juan Manuel Freire, became involved in the stage group ‘Unos Fácil’, which has staged some productions also directed by she.
In her personal life, she shared 48 years with her husband, Félix Martínez Churiaque – also a fellow militancy member – with whom she had two daughters: María and Anjana. In an interview with elDiario.es years ago he said: “We were not militants, we were soldiers, we fought so that there would be a fall of the regime and not an agreed change.” Isabel Tejerina always kept her critical and demanding spirit intact. He said: “Many defeats today are victories tomorrow.” She always kept walking.
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