The baserritarra suit that I've kept for fifteen years from the closet that I took out at Christmas. When I finished my relationship with my then-boyfriend, I left the local dance group and reinvented my life in Bilbao. The trikipods and the summer romerías were left behind. I got into the anti-racist and feminist movement, became new friends and got into the massive nighttime atmosphere of Bilbi and Sanfran. In Big Week I approached the dances of Plaza Nueva with melancholy, but I had no partner to participate in Larrain Dantza.

Last Christmas I recovered that pretty outfit to bring my family out with a beautiful bun in the pasacalles of Olentzero. My nonbinary partner put on her mahon pants and my daughter scratched strawberries. He was the only one who broke with gender binarism in the two-year class of school. We told him that next year he will decide to dress as Olentzero and as a mother, or as Mari Domingi and as a mom.

It has been special to put the skirt, the apron and the wool cane in this new context, because I have interrelated two fields of my biography that seemed incompatible: to follow the traditions that I like, apart from the heteronorma.

I have just interviewed the Basque lesbian Izaskun Aranbarri for the project “Nola esan/izan bollera euskaraz”. He explained to me that, until a few years ago, lesbian people lived with frustration and that Euskera was like oil and water. In fact, the bollo environment he found in Bilbao was a Castilian speaking and the heterogeneous Basque environment in Bilbao.

I met Aranbarri at the KOSA meetings organized by EHGAM last November in a colloquium on the Basque Country. Among those who spoke about the public, these kinds of stories were also repeated: for example, the testimony of a non-binary queer friend who grew up in a Basque town of Gipuzkoa and sexilized to London.

In the interview published by Amets Jordan of EHGAM in ARGIA, Mikel García Idiakez noted the price of sexilium: “Because Madrid, Barcelona, is sexilian to London, hoping that in those places they will be more free and sexually happy, often leaving friends and family, condemning themselves to precarious jobs and expensive rentals.”

In addition to friends and family, we have left behind the Basque culture, Basque culture and traditions. In short, roots.

In order to be who we are, we have had to amputate in some way what we are.

Things are changing, there we have, among others, the sessions of bertsos bollo; the URL 0 of Vitoria. the collective working the bolloproperty from the Basque Country; the editorials Virginie Despentes, Monique Wittig and Adrienne Rich translate to the Basque…

But is it possible to build bridges in the field of folklore too? Yes, of course, there's Oier Araolaza's research work. Also the trikitixa, the feminist discourse and, above all, the #mauriziakezinorhil project of Ines Osinaga. Or the lesbofeminist reading of Lidia García on copla and zarzuela in Spain.

I discovered late, thanks to ARGIA, the Baztarreko dantzariak project, developed by Mariques activists Ibai Fresnedo and Kepa Blázquez between 2016-2019: “The imaginary, the wardrobe, etc. Today, in Basque dances, it replaces the hegemonic. We want to make us see what has no place: maricas, lampstands, coming from the outside, thick, invalid…”, they explained. How did they do it? Through Basque dances.

Do you know transfeminist romerías? If not, let us organize them!