He marched towards utopia without discouragement, without slowing down for momentum or looking back. Without ever trembling in this vital journey of advocacy and activism which led him to embrace and defend freedom, politics, teaching and theater with unwavering passion and commitment. All thanks to her persistent activism in a critical gaze that never wavered and which she projected from whatever stage she appeared on: as a city councilor, teacher, activist or actress. He was always there, not in the spotlight, but on the front lines.
Isabel Tejerina (Mieres, 1949) left the scene for good yesterday. He reached the sky his generation fought so hard for, long before the 15M rebellion wave. Hardened in the post-war mining environment of Mieres, her hometown, in a large family of eleven brothers and sisters, a father who was a doctor and a mother with strong religious convictions who emancipated herself from work during the dictatorship, Tejerina seems to have inherited the revolutionary spirit of the region from October 34. His adolescence and youth in Oviedo were “a succession of discoveries and ruptures with the ideas he had received, until reaching atheism overnight,” he confessed in an interview with the Legado Cantabria project, which preserves his vital testimony told in the first person.
In reality, Tejerina always wanted to be a journalist or a doctor. But he did not have the opportunity, because in Oviedo there were no such diplomas. “You don’t like reading?” » his father asked him. “Well, study Philology, there’s that here.” Later, she would end up recognizing that she was very happy with her vocation as a teacher, first in secondary education, then at the University of Cantabria, teacher trainer, where she was professor of education of early childhood and retired as a teacher of language teaching and literature.
At the University of the 1970s, he joined very early in 1969 the FELIPE, the Popular Liberation Front, which was an anti-Franco left-wing circle initially made up mainly of intellectuals. on a platform to organize a rally, we threw leaflets or organized bullfights and illegal gatherings, I had a lot of problems at home”, remembers Isabel herself. “One, for having broken the tradition and the ideas they had, and another, for fear of being arrested.”
Torrelavega was, at age 22, her first assignment as a teacher. She only stayed there for three years because the director of the Besaya Institute fired her for leading the PNN protests, untenured teachers who went on strike because they were not paid and because they had no 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 pedagogical school. At that time she was already active in the Spanish Communist Party, which would later be called the Spanish Workers’ Party, the PTE, of which she was general secretary. It was a time without the right to strike, nor to associate, nor to meet: “We did everything clandestinely and I combined that with militancy within the party, as I was alone in Cantabria at that time”, he explained in an interview.
Isabel Tejerina was the most important and leading woman in Cantabria in this first political line and also the first democratic woman to become municipal councilor of Santander, when she led the municipal candidacy of the PTE. His confrontations with the mayor at the time, the controversial and controversial Juan Hormaechea, were epic. She did not flinch in the face of her strong character and publicly denounced the arbitrary sentences which, it seemed, sowed arbitrariness in the municipal decisions of the time. “We were idealistic, dedicated and generous. We fought a lot against the dictatorship, we did our job even if others later won medals,” he recalled about that time.
We were idealistic, dedicated and generous. We fought a lot against the dictatorship, we did our job even if others later won the medals
Isabelle Tejerina
He served on the City Council from 1979 to 1982. He failed to complete his term. A few months earlier, Hormaechea and the Alianza Popular councilors had expelled her from City Hall due to a sentence, not final, which disqualified her for having participated in the occupation of empty social housing. Even in this she was a pioneer, rebellious and courageous. This happened in 1979. A family with three very young children occupied a municipal apartment in Plaza de la Leña, which had been empty for ten years. When the court order for expulsion came, party members 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 evening because my daughter was a two-month-old baby and the commissioner, with a lot of pomp, with a very paternalistic and very cool tone, let me go,” he said. about this episode. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him. She was arrested twenty times, but only once in prison with women who worked as prostitutes in Laredo with whom she befriended. They immediately released her because she was a well-known woman, a teacher at the Pedagogical School and a representative of her party.
She participated in the launch of neighboring associations such as La Encina and feminist organizations helping women. At the University, he formed the association “University and Solidarity”, with among others Milagros Gárate, which for 17 years developed more than a hundred cooperation projects in the third world thanks to 0.7% of the salary of 150 professors and university staff. An organization which, when its promoters retired, was dissolved for 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 staged some productions also directed by She.
In her personal life, she shared 48 years with her husband, Félix Martínez Churiaque – also an activist – with whom she had two daughters: María and Anjana. In an interview with elDiario.es years ago, he said: “We were not activists, we were soldiers, we fought so that there was a fall of the regime and not a change agreed.” Isabel Tejerina has always kept her critical and demanding spirit intact. He said: “Many defeats today will be victories tomorrow. » She still continued walking.
