On Saturday, Irún celebrated the feast of Jaion, which commemorates the occupation carried out by the Youth Alive movement two decades ago. Under heavy rains, the touring concert on a truck that skillfully demanded the city of Irún, and ended the party in the youth center in the early hours of the night. For many young people, the Jaion besta has always been a “milestone”. For everything that implies “seeing faces of surprise on the sidewalks, and doing so while enjoying and claiming an act of counterculture on the Columbus route.”

The Lakaxita Youth Centre in Irun celebrates its 20th anniversary. Lakaxita is the only youth project in the Bidasoa area that survives through occupation. And in 20 years he has seen firsthand the organization of the resistance centers and the popular movement, as well as the materialization of several projects. Conferences, concerts, vegeta workshops, hacklabs, the distribution center of vegetable cooperatives for food sovereignty, the first point of sale of Cultivar Chingudi, the meeting point of the anti-AAV movement, Yeah was also the first headquarters of the movement on the housing problem and/or the Irún Reception Network, in the face of the floods of migratory lehe in the summer of 2018, when they turned the youth shelter into a refuge to receive them.

Now, on the contrary, under the threat of the social housing that the City Council of Irún and the Basque Government want to build in the area of San Migel-Anaka, the urban project can jeopardize the youth home. However, Lakaxita is an exceptional youth center in the region and the Basque Country. In the years following the occupation, a judge recognized that “the place where it was a landfill, which was a problem, had been solved by the young rebels of Irun of Jóvenes de Bizirik”.

Several generations have had the opportunity to learn, organize, experiment and train in Lakaxita during these two decades. And as long as they plan to survive, celebrating 20 years of history in the other Jaion doesn’t mean they look back, but the opposite. However, the youth movement has a history in Irun, but not so much memory. La Radio La Antxeta has spoken with some of the members of the current and former assembly, trying to look back and highlight the trajectory that has taken place in the last 20 years.

In fact, its members have highlighted that Lakaxita has not intended to equate the association of Irún with the mainstream, but they have made attempts to expand it to the neighborhood and carry out different projects together. But the image that he projects outwards has been and continues to be one, “and that is why he has always been excluded from the authorities”. Because the resistance of another possible Irun is foco.