Women from Forcarei María del Carmen Vilar Vilar, woman miner

Carmucha always lived in Quintelas, in the parish of Millerada.102 years old, this neighbour of Forcarei has a life full of hard work.her mother died very young and it was her who raised and cared for her 7 siblings.Carmucha was a miner before the Civil War in 1933-1934. She went down to the mine many times and even went down in the wagons. The metal that was extracted from this mine (Mina de Calvos) was tin, which after being extracted, was washed in wooden cradles and sold by weight in Beariz and Doade, where it was reached on foot. Sometimes, both to take it from the mine and to go to the sale, the people would go with the raptors on their laps. The mine was expropriated by the company of Gulías, at that time they began to pay him a small salary but he never had insurance, he worked in farming, he went to pick gorse, chop and carry firewood, harvest rye, wheat, corn and even worked in the care of the cows. She learned to sew and did it for the house and for her family. She remembers sewing uniforms for her brothers who had gone to the Civil War. They were overalls made from the fabric of her loom, and the village practitioner could not come every day to the villages to give injections, so she taught him how to do it. It was she who went to the neighbouring houses to give them, and as the penicillin had to be injected exactly every eight hours, she often had to sleep in the houses where she was asked for it. If she had studied, Carmucha had wanted to be a doctor, “I would have been good at it”, she was very fond of cooking, kneading bread and making roscones. For her the best thing about living in Forcarei is the tranquillity “it was always better here than with the noise of the capital”. She speaks with joy about the “ruadas” (street parties) that a girl organised every week in her house or when it was her turn to organise a place. Carmucha did not marry because “the young man I wanted did not want me and what I wanted I did not want”. Her bachelorhood allowed her to take care of her siblings and nephews and nieces as if they were her own children. Carmucha remembers moments of joy lived in the festivities of the Dolores in Forcarei, in the Fiesta del Aciveiro where she spent the day snacking in the Carballeira with food that was brought in baskets from the house, and she strongly rejects the machismo of the past, because women depended on men. For this reason, she recommends the women of Forcarei “not to be slaves either to their jobs or to their partners, because we were already slaves in the past”, she reiterates with her extraordinary lucidity, and she also advises young women who are starting to work to defend their rights and to be paid the same as men, not to allow them to be paid less for work of equal value.