The kiss without consent of Luis Rubiales, suspended president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, to Jennifer Hermoso, a player for the Mexican Pachuca and the National Team, has gone around the world. In recent days there have been a multitude of gestures, displays of support and messages of encouragement addressed to the footballer and condemning the events, the label dropped.
This is the case of some festivals that are held annually in Cervera del Río Alhama, a town on the border between La Rioja and the province of Soria, where women are not allowed to dance. For a decade now, a group of women from this town at the foot of the Sierra de Alcarama have mobilized to try to give a twist to the tradition of La Gaita, a dance with more than 500 years of tradition danced by men " virgins and singles”, according to the writings.
It all started ten years ago, when those involved proposed to end the tradition and join the La Gaita dance. However, they ran into the refusal of the brotherhoods of Santa Anta and San Gil. Despite this, the response on the street has been divided, with bagpipers coming to turn their backs on the women who wanted to participate in the so-called Mixed Bagpipe. The arrival of the San Gil festivities has led to an even stronger response from his brotherhood.
Its managers have issued a statement rejecting their participation, clinging to tradition: "Structural innovations in art or folklore cannot be undertaken before being sure that such changes do not destroy what is intended to be preserved, for which respect He asks the bagpipe to transmit it as we have received it from our ancestors: without alterations that compromise its meaning and its future”.
In the same way, they cannot "accept an undemocratic imposition by an organized group before a decision that corresponds to the brothers, and not to outsiders", noting that only "natural young men from Cervera" can participate. "In Cervera, Santa Ana is honored and not San Joaquín or the Virgin, more than her husband San José", pointing to a "false contradictory and liquid feminism, which does not even define what is meant by a woman".
La Gaita Mixta, made up of 21 women and three men, has communicated through a participant her firm decision to continue dancing, despite the rejections. “We will dance in the street as we have always done, we will do the usual route without mixing with them. We go separately because now we are the ones who do not want to dance in a Bagpipe that belongs to a brotherhood with such anachronistic, discriminatory thinking and disrespect for women ”, she added.
