Josefa, neskame
Alaitz Melgar Agirre
Elkar, 2022

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Josefa Agirre Etxeberria was one of the women who was raised during the Franco regime. After being exiled at the age of fourteen, he was forced to change his residence throughout his life, guided by needs other than his own. It is not surprising, therefore, that the patriarchal and capitalist system has made Josefa's trajectory invisible to us so far. But how do we recognize a life that has left no trace? Alaitz Melgar Agirre, his grandson, moves away from hegemonic historiography to bring his grandmother's biography to the center and reflect on the oppression suffered in the Josefa handbook.

“There are no names anywhere,” says the author. To reconstruct that life that does not appear in official documents, the writer has had to go beyond scientific research. To do so, she was assisted by the Tene Mujika grant. The scholarship is a collaboration between the editorial Elkar and the City Hall of Must and has been received previously by Iñigo López Simón, Kattalin Miner and Jon Alonso, among others. Melgar was the sixteenth winner in 2023. With the aim of working with nearby history through non-fiction projects, Melgar immerses himself in the “realm of speculation” and reconstructs an entire invisible life through testimonies and intuitions. He has resorted to oral history and analyzed the conditions of opportunity and the fields of opportunity to find what does not appear on the surface.

This experimental text leads us to reflect on the influence of indirect conditions and oppression on mental health while recovering Josefa's life. In fact, mental health is never an isolated issue. According to the writer, Josefa “was locked up forever in a cage,” but now he has tried to break that cage of oblivion. Let us therefore continue to do memory exercises, clarifying what is hidden, giving voice to what has been silenced and creating a more complete version of history. This book is a refuge for those of us who want to go down that road, for those of us who want to bring equality to the center.