User:Agusalon/Agustina González López

Agustina González López, "la Zapatera",  ( a nickname “the shoemaker”) (Placeta de Cauchiles, Granada, 1891 – Víznar, 1936) was a 20th century Spanish writer, thinker, avant-garde painter and politician.

Life
She studied at the Royal College of Santo Domingo in the Andalusian city of Granada, becoming interested in astronomy and medicine at a very young age. When her mother was widowed, it was her older brothers and paternal uncles who were in charge of her education. She was allowed to read after a family council. To evade this strict surveillance, she began to dress as a man. When she was discovered, she pleaded "social insanity" to avoid punishment. However, as she was considered to be suffering from hysterical attacks, she had to submit to long periods in bed and strict diets.

Influenced by the ideas of the writer Bartolomé José Gallardo and his “Diccionario crítico burlesco” and those of the bibliographer Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, she published in 1916 the essay Idearium Futurismo, where she advocates a simplification of spelling. "«El sistema futurista de eskribir resuelbe las difucultades ortográfikas por lo mismo ke simplifika la ortografía. Este libro ba todo esckrito en futurismo…» (fragment of the prologue of the essay Idearium Futurismo, which suppresses the consonants y, c, h, q, v, x and z.)"In this period of life she met the poet Federico García Lorca, and she inspired him  the protagonist of his play La zapatera prodigiosa and also the character of Amelia in La casa de Bernarda Alba, as she called herself by this name, which she also used to sign her writings.

In 1928, linked to Freemasonry, she published “Las Leyes Secretas” (The Secret Laws), a book in which she expressed her theosophical conception of life and death. In this book  she related how, as a hypnotist, she managed to draw the color of the spirits and their forms. With her essay “Justificación” (Justification), she wanted to explain the reason for her scandalous behavior. She paid for the publishing of her books herself and sold them in the family shoe shop.

She ran in the Spanish general elections of 1933 with the Partido Entero Humanista party. The ideology of this party consisted of a mixture of esoteric content (Entero) and trust in the human being (Humanismo). She was endorsed by two members of the Socialist Party: Alejandro Otero Fernández and Rafael García Duarte Salcedo. In these same elections, and also for the constituency of Granada, María Lejárraga was running. González obtained 9 votes in the capital and 6 in the towns.

After the coup d'état in Spain of 1936 she was imprisoned, transferred to the town of Viznar and shot along with two other women, although the exact date of her death is unknown. JuanTrescastro, who boasted of having murdered García Lorca, also claimed for himself the death of La Zapatera "for being a whore". In 1939, a trial was opened in which she was accused of belonging to Freemasonry and sympathizing with the left-wing parties. She was sentenced to a compensation of 8,000 pesetas, which her relatives had to pay.

Francisco Ayala remembers her in his “Relatos granadinos” as "an extravagant figure, probably a crackpot. She wandered about a lot, entered cafés and restaurants 'and alone!' and wrote absurd things that she had printed and then put on sale in the window of her shoe shop”.

Playwright
She wrote two plays: “Cuando la vida calla” (When life is quiet), a comedy in three acts, which was premiered and poorly received by critics, and the drama “Los prisioneros del espacio”, which is not known to have been premiered. In this work she staged the theosophical assumptions. It consists of three acts, a number of special symbolism and seven scenes. The characters, acting in the present, in the past and in the future, delimit the boundaries between the world of matter and the world of the spirit. Her feminist ideology also made her endow the third person of the Trinity, the spirit, with a feminine nature, as Helena Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society., had done.

Work

 * 1916 – Idearium Futurismo. Essay
 * 1927 – Justificación (Justification). Essay
 * 1928 – Las Leyes Secretas (The secret laws). Essay


 * Work reviews of Idearium futurismo
 * In La Correspondencia de España, nº 21.741
 * In ABC el 19-09-1917