Audiovisual report · Pallars Jussà · September 2021
They are women from Pallars. Women who have come from other regions: the most distant, from Peru, and the closest, from Tàrrega. They are the new women from Pallars.
Manel Sanz, September 2021. “Foreigners, newly arrived women, immigrants, from abroad, prostitutes, from the old town, without papers”. This list is taken from the Facebook page “Parla pallarès”. I made a post there and a significant number of members intervened explaining how people born in Pallars call people who come from other lands. The women who are part of the report (fifteen) were born in Niger, Sabadell, Morocco, two in Barcelona, the Netherlands, Peru, Mataró, Germany, the Dominican Republic, Palestine, Poland, Lleida, Tàrrega and Sant Joan de Vilatorrada.
I was born in Barcelona and, like them, Pallars Jussà is not my birthplace. It is not my place of welcome, nor my daily work. Fifteen of them are. They meet the requirements I set for myself: women born outside Pallars Jussà, between 18 and 40 years old, who live in different places in the Pallars territory. Some of them are over 40 years old. However, fulfilling every detail of the original project meticulously, thread by thread, is almost impossible.
My relationship with Pallars is family: my mother was born in Pont de Claverol. After many years, in 2017 I decided to do my first report on these lands, Els Balust and Pallars Jussà. I didn't intend to do a family story —Balust is my middle name— and I think I succeeded. I made good friends there and it helped me meet unknown relatives.
As they say in the world of performing arts, this report is a choral work, there is no single voice singing: there are fifteen women who have appeared in my world thanks to the networks of women that I have woven together during the production. Trini, Gemma, Anna, Roser, Palmira… each of them has made it possible to exchange telephone affections with the production manager.
Some words read in María Sánchez's book Tierra de mujeres (she takes them from A Lucky Man by John Berger) have become the backbone of this report: “[…] For those behind the curtain, together with the villagers, the referents of the landscape are no longer just geographical, but also biographical and personal.” These women have all given us a repertoire of their lives, precise details to understand how a woman lives —that one, she and they— who has settled in this Pallars and who wants to be recognized as an equal. They don't want to be newcomers: some have children from Pallars and others want to have them here; others work here because they have to. This is called rooting. They are Pallars women.
They are creators of the present. Free to move from here to there, to create new families. To go where work calls for them, with the strength and confidence to be sure that their decision will make all family members happy. And, of course, professional changes to be closer to their loved ones and find new tools to earn a living, and rediscover the landscapes and sounds of Pallars.
