San Vicente de la Barquera (EFE) he faced the problems of the transition from dictatorship to democracy that “any mayor would have had.”
“I think that there is – a real equality – or at least there has been. In my time there has been. Why weren’t there more women then? Because we were privileged, I went to university and had the chance to study,” Sánchez told EFE in an interview at her home in San Vicente de la Barquera.
Celestina Sánchez shows several newspaper clippings, such as the news on the day the autonomy statute for Cantabria was approved, in which she appears as the only woman among the Cantabrian members of the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD).
Forty-four years after that photo, in Cantabria there are 16 female mayors in the 102 municipalities of the region, and Celestina Sánchez encourages women to take a step forward, although -she remarks- “it is a personal decision”.
Despite being the only woman at the time, she affirms that she “never” felt “marginalized or in trouble”. “Totally accepted,” Sánchez asserts, that she does warn that in her four-year term she had the “problems” that “any mayor who had entered would have had.”
An office to “throw out” the mayor
“They have already passed, you have to signal and it is not appropriate,” he explains and assures that part of his time in politics was trying to “accommodate the environment” at the moment of democratic transition.
What Celestina Sánchez does see is an “invisibility”, also today, of the women who served as references for her, from her professors at the Faculty of Law to the teachers of the rural environment, a trade that she claims for everything that ” contributed” to society.
And he considers that “it is useless” to look at the past “with the eyes of the present”. “Probably things were done wrong, but there was good faith, and there were no means,” he says.
Typical of those times of change was the “anecdote” that Sánchez had with the previous mayor, who had been holding the baton of command in Val de San Vicente for “many years”.
“I would arrive around twelve every day and I would arrive and find him sitting in the office with the mail open,” says the former mayoress.
This “invasion” of his space caused a small stir in the City Council, which had only a municipal secretary and two policemen who did administrative work, since no one dared to say anything to “Don Domingo”. “In the end we made a trade for him to leave,” he details.
In politics, by the way
Sánchez, who is now 74 years old, was only one legislature in charge of the Cantabrian municipality and the rest of her working life has been a lawyer in her office in Potes, a profession that she made compatible with that of mayor.
“I was very clear, I was not going to live on politics,” he says and explains that he appeared in his town with a “why not?” after going “as far as possible” from him, to Salamanca, to study.
“I had no intention of introducing myself, far from it, but a friend from San Vicente, who later became president of the Assembly (Parliament), Isaac Aja, told me Celes, we need people and I said why not? There was no ideology or anything. I said, if I can serve and do something positive, why not?” he insists.
They were four years marked by the promotion of services in Val de San Vicente, a municipality of 14 towns, in which “in half of them” there was no running water. “I have fulfilled my part with society,” he considers.
However, he does not see present in politics today, that vocation to “serve” and “seek solutions” to people’s problems. “It gives me the feeling that political parties have become private companies, where people hold on to the chair and do not let go,” he concludes.
The entry Celestina Sánchez, first female mayor in Cantabria: “I never felt discriminated against” was first published in EFE Noticias.
