Lola Cabrillana arrives at the EL PAÍS Editorial Office first thing in the morning. She doesn't mind getting up early. She is very used to getting up at dawn from Monday to Sunday. She arrived in Madrid last night to collect the Solidarity Award awarded to her by the Secretariado Gitano Foundation and took full advantage of the tickets and the stay to promote her book, which she wrote encouraged by her almost 40,000 followers on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, where she tells of her daily life as a kindergarten teacher at a school in a poor neighborhood in Malaga and as her sister's assistant at her bag stall at the weekend street market in the luxurious districts of Puerto Banús and Estepona. . She knows a bit about diversity. And to tell stories, apart from teaching reading and writing, she writes novels.
Where does your storytelling streak come from?
I have been writing since I was little. I was a very fantasy girl. I wrote my first story when I was five years old. It was called The magic windows, my father still has it saved. He continued writing and gave the stories to my friends, until when I saw that there were painters selling their paintings on the beach, I started selling my stories too. I earned a teaching degree with what I earned as a storyteller, and many of those who told stories were mine. I got my job as a teacher because I went to tell stories to the children at a school and I fell in love with the project. It is a charter school in La Palmilla, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Malaga, and in Europe.
Why were you seduced by that center and not another?
It has 90% of the gypsy population. I have been teaching there for 20 years, first in secondary school support and, for the last 13, to preschool children. I have had students from two generations, I have taught parents and children, realize that there are gypsy boys and girls who have children who are 13 and 14 years old.
The Gypsy Secretariat encrypts the school dropout of gypsy children in 87% before high school. Do you see it in the classroom?
Yes. And it kills me that the gypsy people do not value training, we must cling to it, because it is the key to our progress and freedom. It is also true that the school is not welcoming for the gypsy boy or girl, who has his circumstances at home. There is a lot to transform. I have been in education for 20 years and almost nothing has progressed. We also have our responsibility. You have to open your eyes. But it is difficult to get out of certain circles, such as that of poverty. We would have to go case by case and support them.
In her book she recreates an engagement ceremony, including a handkerchief test, for a 15-year-old gypsy girl, and the narrator doesn't like it. Don't you either?
My heart is broken there. My culture has good things, but we gypsies are not evolving at the speed I would like and the role of the gypsy woman does not have the relevance it should have. I respect traditions, but the handkerchief test makes my blood burn. It is not a tradition, it is a custom, and it should evolve, especially since men are not asked to prove their virginity. The only thing that consoles me, and I have been able to understand it, is that it is voluntary on the part of the woman to submit to her.
But if she does not submit, she is separated and stigmatized.
No, that is not so. That is a prejudice, like so many that circulate about us. I have students who run away with their girlfriend, an accepted practice, and go to live with him, when they are 10 or 15 years old, and the girls are neither asked for the handkerchief test nor are they kept away from them. nothing.
Why do you think that gypsy women are not advancing as they should?
There are many factors. The main one is that gypsies are not integrated into society. We live very closed in on ourselves, and, therefore, the gypsy continues to be a sexist society. I wouldn't say that gypsies are more sexist than the rest. My father always encouraged his daughters to study and wash the dishes and cook. I don't have that example at home. But we evolve very slowly.
He maintains that Spain continues to be racist towards gypsies. What was his first personal experience with it?
On my sixth or seventh birthday, I was new to school and I invited the whole class to have a snack, although my teacher had told me that she didn't know if the children would come because they didn't want to go into the house. a gypsy, and no one came. My mother was left with the buns untouched, and I was crying my eyes out. My father sat with me and told me: “Lola, you can't love what you don't know.” That stuck with me and since then I have made it a point for people to know me and my loved ones.
And did you get your classmates to go to your birthday parties?
Yes. Recently, at the presentation of my book, a childhood friend told me that what they remembered most were my birthdays. They began to change the moment they met me, met my parents and my environment, and began to appreciate us.
Why is that so difficult, getting to know each other?
Because they don't let us show ourselves. Many people are not caught at work because they are gypsies. I have seen it with my own eyes. Mothers of my students who want to work in a supermarket, pass all the tests and, when the face-to-face interview arrives, they are fired, or they are not called back because they are gypsies, they are not told that way, of course, but it goes without saying. This way you can't know anyone or check if they are good workers or not. My safe conduct to avoid suffering that racism, for example, is that I am blonde.
And that?
Because I don't look like a gypsy. Mothers and fathers of school children have asked me to go with them to rent them an apartment, and they have rented it when they saw me. It even happens to me with my sister. She is dark and does look like a gypsy. When I go with her, they read me as a gypsy and put me in her bag. If I go alone, no. Look, she has a stall selling bags and accessories at the market, and she has my book on display. People ask her why she sells it. She says that her sister wrote it, that is, me, and they don't believe it. As if a gypsy couldn't write a book.
She is blonde, single and has no children at 51 years old. Are you a rare bird in your community?
Not at all, the gypsy community is more diverse than all that. I have had several partners, I have not married and now I am single. We have the image of the gypsy who marries at 13 and has children at 15, which exists, of course it exists, but there is much more than the stereotype. That is one of the things that has changed the most in these years. That the couple is forever. Personal freedom. In that we have evolved.
Did you like the successful reality television Gipsy Kings?
It makes me feel ridiculous, because that is not reality, they are stereotypes that help perpetuate prejudices about us. Maybe they represent 1% or 2% of the Roma population. It's a caricature of our culture and it hurts me. How the movie 'Carmen and Lola' hurt me, where gypsies are portrayed as homophobic. We are not. Not all. That has changed a lot, for the better, in recent years. And social networks have played an important role in normalizing diversity there.
At the market there are stall neighbors who are black, Moroccan and other ethnicities. Are gypsies racist towards others?
I honestly think not. What's more, at school, when one of my children sees that their Maghreb or black friend is being picked on, they come out to defend him, because they know what that is like. I think that, more than racists, we are all classists. You are racist with the poor gypsy, not with the rich. Just as one is racist with the Moor or the poor black, not with the rich. Look, once, at the Puerto Banús market, a very posh dressed lady heard me say: “It's so hot.” She faces me and says: “Having studied.†I preferred to laugh, but in the end I told her that I had two careers, how many did she have. She went dry.
How much do panties cost at the Puerto Banús market?
Ha ha ha. I think the one in Puerto Banús doesn't sell panties. Now, the best bags, and the most beautiful, are my sister's.
'THE GYPSY MASTER'
Lola Cabrillana (Málaga, 51 years old) is @de_infantil on her She went through that channel, and after being encouraged to self-publish her first book, You color cinnamonencouraged by her followers, when she received a commission from a large publisher to edit her second book, 'The gypsy teacher', of which seven editions have been released. After 20 years dedicated to teaching, which she came to after earning a living as a storyteller, many of which were written by her, she continues to denounce the difficulties faced by her gypsy students and admits that, although none of them has graduated from any university degree, he trusts that someone will do so in the near future. She, meanwhile, boasts that she has managed to eradicate absenteeism from her preschool classes at the school in La Palmilla, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Malaga, studying the case of each specific child and involving parents in the effort. .
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