Carmen Goya

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Sites of memory · Year: 1905-1986

This street is named after Gregoria Magdalena Goya Hernández (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1905 -1986), better known as Carmen Goya, an anarchist political activist and one of the most fervent labour fighters of the entire 20th century in the Canary Islands.

Born into a large family whose father, a subordinate worker of the capital's town hall, was concerned with providing education and instruction to all his children, Carmen was one of the few women of her social class at that time who learned to read and write properly. At the age of thirteen she began working in a tobacco factory and immediately joined the anarchist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), which was very active in the city at that time. She always had great expressive ability with plain and direct language; she enjoyed attending lectures and talks on libertarian communism, sexuality, birth control and various issues affecting working women. 

Very politically active, she participated in the main strikes held during the turbulent period of the Second Republic (tenants, tobacco, port) and after the outbreak of the Civil War she was among those who attended the anarchist meeting in Cueva Roja, held with the purpose of forcibly stopping the rebels. Days later, many of those anarchists gathered there were arrested and prosecuted. Twenty-one death sentences were handed down, including that of Carmen Goya, although her sentence, along with that of María Luisa Hernández León, was commuted to thirty years in prison, a sentence she began to serve in the old prison on San Miguel Street.

Years later she was transferred under a semi-freedom regime to Las Palmas, where in 1951 she managed to embark for Venezuela. There, as just another emigrant, she remained for more than twenty years until her return to Tenerife in the 1970s. Already retired, with a small pension and no fixed place to live, she relied on the precarious help of old friends to survive.

With the arrival of democracy, her support for all left-wing causes was constant until her death at the age of eighty-one, which occurred on 31 December 1986.

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