Azucena Roja

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1890-1968

Isabel González González (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1890-1968) was known by this pseudonym; she was the first woman to become, in 1936, a councillor of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council. She represented the Communist Party (PCE). Today, a street in the Cuesta Piedra neighbourhood of the capital bears her name.

Isabel González spent her childhood and youth in Cuba, where she had emigrated with her mother. After returning to Tenerife, she settled in Puerto de la Cruz, where she married Aurelio Perdigón, a shoemaker by profession. The couple soon moved to a house on Horacio Nelson Street in Santa Cruz, where Isabel opened a successful sewing workshop.

In 1919 she joined the PSOE, becoming the founder and president of the Socialist Women's League, while also leading the organisation of working women in Tenerife. Self-taught, she published articles under her pseudonym Azucena Roja in the magazine El Socialista , always advocating the active role of women in the society of the time.

She became clearly aware of the new revolutionary era established by the Bolsheviks in Russia after the October Revolution, and in 1921 she became a staunch defender of the island's socialists joining the Third International. Her revolutionary conviction sowed the seed of what would later become the communist party in Tenerife. Her involvement with Marxist-Leninist ideas led her to stand as a candidate for the PCE in the elections called by the Spanish Second Republic in November 1933. Two years later she travelled for several months through the Soviet Union as part of a delegation of Spanish workers, where she witnessed the "socialist reality" first-hand.

After the Popular Front won the elections in February 1936, the civil governor from Izquierda Republicana, Vázquez Moro, appointed her councillor of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council representing the Communist Party of Spain. She was the first woman in history to be part of the capital's corporation.

The outbreak of the Civil War forced Isabel González into hiding, and she remained concealed for years in various places in Tenerife. In 1945, after a pardon, she returned to live in her house on Horacio Nelson Street, working again as a seamstress. She never abandoned her strong political convictions. She died in 1968.

With the arrival of democracy, the City Council named a street in the Cuesta Piedra neighbourhood, one of the most humble and with the largest working-class population in the capital, "Isabel Gonzalez 'Azucena Roja'".

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