The women who also told the village’s story

Juliana, la Jabonera

Juliana Sanz Sánchez was born in Alustante on 28 January 1913, the year electricity arrived and work began on the Tordesilos road. At ninety-four she told Ángel Lorente her story for Hontanar.

She remembered doña Virginia, her teacher, and a crowded class of 107 girls in winter. She liked school and attended until well past fourteen. Even then she noticed the teacher taught richer girls more than poorer ones. Years later teachers urged her children to prepare in Molina for secondary studies because they were capable, but the family could not afford it and never tried. She regretted that.

As girls they played skipping-rope, pin games and descansaderas, and watched puppets at tío Frutos’s house. Girls from poor families entered domestic service. She spent five years as the pharmacist’s nanny; he wanted to take her to Teruel, but her mother refused. Later she served twenty-one months in Barcelona. At home and in the fields she did everything: reaping, binding, carrying, threshing with her father, kneading bread and taking it to the oven, paying the baker with a loaf, fetching spring water, washing in the river, sewing and whitewashing.

Her courtship with Ignacio Sanz lasted nine years. Young men placed floral enramadas on girlfriends’ doors; one night Ignacio’s friends sang three verses beneath her window. People married their equals, poor with poor. There was no banquet: the confectioner’s house served a breakfast of chocolate, sponge cakes and refreshments, and she waited tables there too. Ignacio gave orders, like all men, Juliana said, although she was a woman with a mind of her own.

She remembered a mayo that village youths had sung to her mother, Maximina, when she was born on 29 May, in exchange for a duro and a hare. She learned it from her and sang it in full during the interview. It resembles songs still sung in the Albarracín mountains. She also sang while threshing, “my mouth going like a scythe all day”. She remembered carnivals, banned after the war, dressed in her father’s trousers with her face covered.

Tía Jacinta, of Comestibles Arrazola

Jacinta was born in Checa on 11 September 1916 to a poor family. At nine she caught typhus; her shroud was ready at home, but she survived. She lost her father early and began service very young. Of her first household she said the mistress was very mean, but she learned quickly and became more cunning than her employer.

At fifteen she went with other village girls to work in Valencia, then Barcelona. Thursday and Sunday afternoons were free: she walked, went to the cinema and sometimes visited the Liceu. During the war she saw La Pasionaria passing through Barcelona on a military lorry. Every August she returned to Checa for the fiestas, until she met Eugenio Arrazola one year and stayed. She raised his three children from his first marriage as her own; together they had Marina.

With Eugenio, then Marina’s help, she ran Comestibles Arrazola, selling everything from footwear and clothing to food and household goods. Such was her cooking skill that she prepared hospitality for official village visits and served meals at home. Her grandchildren paid tribute in Aguaspeña in 2013, when she still cooked daily and remained active behind the scenes in the shop.

La Molinera

María Magdalena, known throughout Checa by the inherited nickname la Molinera, was born on 22 July around 1930 in a mill. “I was seven and already washing in the river,” she said. She explained good laundry: kneel, rub soap into clothes until softened, then wash; if sunny, spread them on the grass, because sun is best for clothes. Her preferred water was from El Rochón, requiring far less soap. She still made her own: five litres of fat, five or six of oil, water and a kilo of soda, stirred until set and cut into bars once cold.

Her home retained the old kitchen: the torch holder where her mother read by resinous pine light, the opening for pouring surplus water into the street, cantareras recessed into walls, the vasar with plates, and cloths embroidered with her mother Isabel García’s initials. Below stood the mill, with the bedroom and kitchen where she lived with her parents, machinery at the back. For years she whitewashed and cared for it herself. She liked bullfights, cards and reading anything she found.

Telling the village from within

In 1995 the Checa Women’s Association introduced itself in Aguaspeña. It spoke of participation and learning, and the difficulties of finding work, studying or travelling from a village. Two years later members published their own study of Checa, its population and services, within the European NOW programme.

The stories continue. In Alustante, Elena Ivanciu arrived twenty-one years ago from Iași in Romania’s Moldavia. She worked in home care and domestic service around Tordesilos and neighbouring villages, opened a grocery shop downstairs at home and, with her family, took over an Alustante bar in 2020 just before lockdown. Elena Borbolla tells it in Hontanar in 2026. Yolanda Temprado returned to Armallones, where she spent childhood summers, restored her father’s house and opened accommodation in Armallones and Villanueva de Alcorón. The difficulties of staying appear in A home to stay in. Other women’s lives run through The bread Paulino saved, with Silveria sewing and running a Madrid boarding house, and When the village could be heard, with Toni Ibáñez in Armallones’s bell tower.