The Barcelona City Council has decided to update the names of six libraries in the public network, which will be dedicated to six prominent women. Thus, the writer Ana María Moix gives her name to the Fort Pienc library; the also writer and journalist Rosa M. Arquimbau, in Vila de Gràcia; the Vilapicina i Torre Llobeta library is now known as Carmen Laforet, author of the immortal novel Nada; another writer and librarian, Aurora Díaz Plaja, is the new name of the Nou Barris library; the Canyelles library is dedicated to the social activist M. Àngels Rivas, and finally, the Zona Nord is for the journalist Mària Sánchez.
With these, Barcelona doubles the number of libraries named after women, which until now were five. Without wishing to detract from the rest of the nominees, allow me to focus my attention on my professional colleague, friend, and local information reference, Mària Sánchez. Her death fell like a slab on all of us who knew her a year ago. Not only was she a great professional, but she was also a very good person who earned the esteem of all of us who shared hours of press conferences and news coverage with her in Barcelona.
It was the former mayor and now minister Jordi Hereu who gave me the news early in the morning of that March 16, 2023. I was paralyzed and it took me a while to react. Thyroid cancer detected only a few months earlier took her away. Mària left us an indelible memory not only for her professionalism, but also for her friendliness, photogenicity in front of the camera, and solidarity with her colleagues.
Those years were a kind of golden age of municipal information. Journalists competed among ourselves to offer news. Those of us who worked in the most notorious media of the moment struggled to get better exclusives. And although the competition was always fair, each one played the cards of their sources and kept the information they had as a scoop to cross-reference it privately. We were very careful not to reveal it at a press conference.
Mària, on the other hand, used it openly, because her priority was not the exclusive itself, but to write the best chronicle. In addition, she was always willing to lend a hand to any colleague, either because they did not have certain sources or because they had arrived late. Then, Mària would come to the rescue and share whatever was needed.
Soul of the pioneering environmental program Escarabajo verde, she was a journalist who made informational rigor and her quality as a person her professional hallmarks. Seen over the years, we could debate whether her always respectful journalistic good work had to do with her human quality and if this made her an even better journalist. Probably both are correct.
The professionals who were part of the municipal information pool changed over the years, but Mària stayed. She was the link between two generations of journalists, the one who kept the historical memory of the group. That's why she was a reference. As fellow journalist Clara Blanchart said at her funeral, she was the young one among the older ones and the older one among the young ones.
She left after 35 years of career in the TVE newsroom in Catalunya. Without blemish. She did her work with meticulousness and discretion and with special interest in social issues. Without fuss or overacting. Her colleague Manel Lucas recalled a year ago that Mària also got angry sometimes, but that after a while it passed because, he said textually, she got tired of being angry.
Mària left after 35 years of career in the TVE newsroom in Catalunya, without blemish, she did her work with meticulousness and discretion and with special interest in social issuesMària had not only earned the respect of her colleagues, but also that of mayors and councilors who dealt with her. For this reason, a few days after her death, the municipal plenary session voted unanimously and with words of praise to grant her the Gold Medal of the Barcelona City Council.
These days I have wondered if she would have liked the medal and having a library named after her, given her character. I have chosen to think that she would have received it with a certain contradiction. On the one hand, with the pride of recognition for a job well done, but perhaps also with the vertigo produced by distinctions she never sought. Although I am almost certain that, if they had let her choose the library to name, she would most likely have chosen the one they gave her, the one in Zona Nord, the one in the often forgotten neighborhoods of Ciutat Meridiana, Torre Baró and Vallbona. Mària, the one with the accent on the Mà, was like that.