The Agrarian Council of Valencia commemorated Friday, May 5, Garden Day at the Tocaio Thresher, in El Palmar. There he celebrated a “homage to the 2023 exemplary labradores and labradoras”, with 14 recognitions to people who work in the field: Emilio Nicola Navarro (El Perellonet), Antonio Guanter Bayarri (Carpesa), Manuel Lluch Ferriol (Carpesa), José Miguel Aleixandre Marco (El Palmar), Francisco Rodrigo Vila (Castellar), José Vicente Sebastiá Fabado (Benimámet), José Ramón Barrachina Marqués (Beniferri), Jaume Dasà Ferrer (El Saler), Vicente Sancanuto Dasi (El Saler), José Luis Rodrigo Llopis (Horno de Alcedo), José Velarte Tomás (Castellar), Salvador Velarte Tomás (Castellar) Bruno Muñoz Alonso (Castellar), in the category of young farmer, and Tomás Navarro Navarro (Pinedo), posthumously.
Once again -and there are already many-, comes the question: Where are the women? Where are those “labradors” that are spoken of? It is true that other years there have been. Without going any further, the past, with three out of fifteen (Amparo Rodrigo Legua, Petra Núñez López and Dolores Soler Marco). Few, in any case. It is good that a profession that has been viewed unfairly, for a long time -even today-, be looked down on. Everything that is done for the Valencian orchard will be little, due to the grievance that has dragged on for decades. But we cannot stop talking about them, because that erases us from the collective imagination.
Whoever reads this will say that there aren’t any and they will be so hot. And many of the reflections that I read in *Tierra de mujeres not long ago resonate in my head. An intimate and familiar look at the rural world*, by MarÃa Sánchez. He talks about his family, several generations linked to the fields: “They told us that only men worked, that he was the one who deserved to rest when he got home. We silenced and put those who did the housework, who rolled up their sleeves, in the shade. sleeves and skirts in our villages, who helped in the farrowing pens, who worked in the garden, took care of the chickens, picked olives… We had as normal that our mothers and our grandmothers took care of everything: the house, the care, the children, the fields, the animals. We let them be the ones who counted, the ones who continued to lead the way for others”.
Is this reality so different from that of Valencia? No. And luckily, there have been those who have worked so that the prevailing discourse – white and with the voice of a man – did not silence the women of La Huerta. This is how the group Les Espigolaores did it seven years ago. In the documentary *Entre el dia i la nit no hi ha paret*, Carmen, Pilar, Pepita, Maruja, Lola and Milagros recovered the role of neighbors of the devastated orchard of the Pouet de València. “We would not understand the garden without its memory,” explained one of the promoters of the project at the time.
We can also pull data, thanks to the tireless work they do from FADEMUR. Here we publish that women are underrepresented in positions of responsibility in cooperatives, since there is not the same percentage of women members as there are women on governing boards. To this we should add that most women do not count in the fields because they do not own the land, which men traditionally inherited. That is to say, they worked on them -like the others-, but they were invisible in the eyes of the administration and also socially.
So I ask myself: do we really have a Huerta de València without women farmers or is it that we make them invisible? If they do not exist, perhaps the demand to incorporate half the population into the countryside should be added to all those structural problems we always talk about: aging farmers and lack of generational replacement, abandonment of land, compliance with the law of the food chain, etc. Claim that is not usually on the table, beyond very specific spaces and, most of the time, around March 8.
