Rosa Gabarri Jiménez, the first gypsy woman to obtain a driving license in Asturias, has just been recognized in one of the towns where, at 73, she continues to work with her clothing and shoe stand at the market. The Association of Friends of Grado wanted to recognize the spirit of Rosi, as everyone affectionately calls her. “For her contribution to Moscow society and for her way of seeing life,” the diploma states. Rosi, a “gypsy, gypsy” was and is one of those women who have always opened up paths, since she was born in a chestnut orchard, in the middle of the street, in San Andrés de Trubia, a village a few kilometers from Oviedo. But between San Andrés de Trubia and Oviedo, there is actually a whole world that Rosi found small. It was not enough for him to discover it, he wanted to get out of it and he did. And in a van.
Rosi says that being a gypsy is associated with the fact that “they always blame you for what the payos do, because we have always been persecuted”; but in Grado, they love Rosi. And it is difficult to have a coffee with her on a terrace because they want her to be the one to choose the best sheets for her stand, and if there is one thing that characterizes her, it is that she only works with national products. “Whoever wants to buy cheap should buy it in China. “I sell quality.”
Rosi only went to school for three months, and he says school when in reality he only received private lessons, where he learned just enough to defend himself; She provided the rest, because if she had been born again, she is very clear that she would be an engineer. “As a family, we were constantly coming and going, because no one wanted to rent to us because we were gypsies. Look at life, now I live in an apartment that I bought above the Civil Guard barracks, but I have always known how to adapt,” he says. When he was twelve, he helped his brother. “He worked on the urban roads and I filled his cart, then I spent time serving in Oviedo. He wore a white apron, a cap and gloves; In reality, they hired me because they didn’t know I was a gypsy,” she points out. But Rosi, in this luxurious house where she had to eat in the kitchen and where she was called with the silver bell, was put to the test every day. “They left rings or gold coins on the floor because they thought I was going to steal them. And what did I do? Well, give them to the lady. Hey, excuse me, I found this on the carpet or under the sofa… What a coincidence that something appeared almost every day,” he explains. Fed up with this rude treatment, she left, without putting a single piece of jewelry in her pocket. “I have never been as hungry as in a rich man’s house. If you want to eat well, you have to go to the poor man, who shares everything and treats you differently. From you to you,” Rosi continues.
And from the luxury of the houses of the oldest ancestry of Oviedo, Rosi went to Teverga, where she had a family and worked for a woman who was a farmer and for some Sevillians who fed her with olives. “I was always a gypsy ahead of my time and I was clear about what I wanted to do. In that house in Teverga, the lady treated me very well, she was a breeder, humble people. I worked and did my job, and when I finished the job, we ate together at the table and talked. Listen, if I ate well, I gained ten kilos in a month,” he says graciously. “That was when I had black hair around my waist,” he says. Other times, when I had not yet driven, when I had not traveled in a van to Madrid or Portugal in search of the best goods, when breast cancer had not shown its face either. A cancer that she found while taking a shower. “It was in the middle of a pandemic, they operated on me and gave me chemo and X-rays. After three months, it was already working. I was lucky,” he concludes.
Rosi has a sparkle in his eyes that radiates vitality, freshness and honesty. And you really want it. That’s why, when one day his brother-in-law came home “a little drunk and broke a glass door with his arm and almost bled to death because there was no car to take him to the hospital, I decided that if we succeeded with that, I would get my driving license. And I didn’t say anything at home, because I felt like I was going to be rejected by my parents,” he says. It was a neighbor who almost miraculously managed to take his brother-in-law to the hospital and “we were treated by a wonderful surgeon who stopped the bleeding. The next day I went to enroll in the driving school, which was on Covadonga Street in Oviedo,” says Rosi.
But what a surprise it was that at 22, this young girl had to take a basic exam that required her to have notions of childcare, housekeeping, knowing how to make a buttonhole, what a mayor was… etc. “Franco asked for it, but it didn’t paralyze me, I continued. I studied when I could, I fell asleep with the book on me and I also read it on the bus. It was harder for me to pass this exam than to get my license. “The day I went to the exam, there were more than two hundred women, the only gypsy being me. “My hands were shaking.” A few days after passing the exam, a letter arrived home with the grades and she, who was looking for a pass, saw that the report card gave her a grade. “I thought I had failed, but I had gone to train with a teacher and she explained to me that my exam was more than successful. So I went on my way and showed up for driving theory. When they put me through the answer pattern, they told me I hadn’t made any mistakes and I could go on the track,” Rosi explains.
He got his license for the first time in a Ses Hundred and the same day he was given the receipt, he went with his brother to buy what would be his first van, a second-hand Mercedes. He soon decided that he wanted more, and although he started in the world of street scrap metal sales and then sold mops, pots, brooms and cleaning products in cities where no one reached, he saw in household linen and dug a commercial gap. “I went to Madrid to look for shoes on clearance and to Portugal to buy bed linen, towels, rolling pins … I have always worked a lot because I like to have a little money and now, although I am retired, with a pension that does not reach 800, you will tell me. “If I stay at home, I’ll die,” she explains, smiling, with that serenity that the years have given to Rosi and with the assurance and pride of having been able to do with her life what she wanted.
Rosi is seventy-three years old and it was also in 73 that she got her driving license, more precisely in September. “I think a lot about the gypsies today, there are people who refuse to evolve, that’s why I always say that I am an evolved gypsy.” Rosi evolves with the times and on his eighth van… and yes, he continues to go out on the track every day, in Grado, Pravia and Luanco, the markets that he still maintains because he wants to. “In the summer I see rich ladies, who also buy a lot from me, come to my stand in Luanco to buy and they are accompanied by the maids who are still forced to wear a dress, a cap and an apron, they like to brag about having a daughter. What a pity!” and as Rosi says, there is still a lot to evolve. Maybe Rosi will also give a thousand more laps to the payos.
