Rigoberta
Menchú (b. 1959) is Quiche human rights activist
who was born into a poor indigenous family in rural Guatemala. Menchú's community was perenially exploited and
oppressed by the country's right-wing, Spanish-speaking military
dictatorship which arose in the aftermath of the overthrow of
the popular leftist reformer Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. The ensuing
Guatemalan Civil War lasted several decades, and saw the
Guatemalan government defend its policies with mass arrests,
torture, and the "disappearances" of hundred of thousands of
citizens at the hands of death squads. Among those murdered by
the regime were Menchú's
politically active parents. She dictated her life story, which
is excerpted below, to the anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos in
Spanish, a language she had only begun to learn three years
earlier. Menchú
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, and continues to be a
forceful advocate for women's, indigenous, and human rights in
Latin America in the 21st century.
Excerpts from the Memoir of
Rigoberta Menchú, 1983
This was the first time my father went to prison. My brother said,
‘We don’t know what to do for him because the lawyers say Papá
will be in jail for eighteen years. We need money to get educated
people to help us.’ In Guatemala this is what happens with the
poor, especially Indians, because they can’t speak Spanish. The
Indian can’t speak up for what he wants. When they put my father
in jail, the landowners gave large amounts of money to the judge
there. The judge in El Quiché, that is. There are several levels
of authority. First, there is the military commissioner. He
sometimes lives in the villages or is based in the town, and he
tries to impose his own law. Then there is what we call the mayor
who represents the authorities that administer justice when they
say someone has broken the law. Next come the governors who govern
the whole region, each province. And finally, there are the
deputies–God knows who they are! To get to see the military
commissioner, you first have to give him a mordida, that’s
what we call a bribe in Guatemala. To see the mayor, you have to
get witnesses, sign papers and then give him a mordida so
he will support your case. To see the governor you need not only
witnesses from the village, and money, but also lawyers or other
intermediaries to talk for you. The governor is a ladino and
doesn’t understand the language of the people. He’ll only believe
something if a lawyer or educated person says it. He won’t accept
anything from an Indian. The mayor is a itoo. But he’s a ladino
who’s come from our people. The military commissioner is also
a ladino although this varies a bit, because in some
places the commissioners are Indians who have done military
service and lived in the barracks. There comes a time when they
return to their village, brutalized men, criminals.
My father fought for twenty-two years, waging a heroic struggle
against the landowners who wanted to take our land and our
neighbours’ land. After many years of hard work, when our small
bit of land began yielding harvests and our people had a large
area under cultivation, the big landowners appeared: the Brols.
It’s said there that they were even more renowned criminals than
the Martínez and García families, who owned a finca there
before the Brols arrived. The Brols were a large family, a whole
gang of brothers. Five of them lived on a finca they had
taken over by forcibly throwing the Indians of the region off
their land.
That was what happened to us. We lived in a small village. We
cultivated maize, beans, potatoes and all sorts of vegetables.
Then the Garcías arrived and started measuring the land in our
village. They brought inspectors, engineers and Heaven knows who
else; people they said were from the government. In Guatemala if
it’s to do with the government, there’s no way we can defend
ourselves. So they came and started measuring our land. My father
went round collecting signatures in the village, and they held
meetings. Then he went to the capital, to the INTA, Institute
Nacional de Transformación Agraria de Guatemala: Guatemalan
National Institute for Agrarian Transformation.
But the landowners and the government had made a deal to take the
peasants’ land away from them. When my father went to protest
about the way the landowners were forcing us off our land, the
people in the INTA asked the landowners for money to be allowed to
go on measuring. On the other hand, they gave the peasants a piece
of paper which, according to them, said they didn’t have to leave
their land. It was a double-sided game. They called my father in.
Papá used to be…well, I don’t mean foolish exactly because it’s
the thieves who steal our land who are foolish…. Well, they asked
my father to sign a paper but he didn’t know what it said because
he’d never learned to read or write. In fact, the paper said that
the peasants confirmed, once again, that they would leave their
land. This gave the landowners power, since he, the community’s
representative, had signed the paper. My father went back again to
protest, this time through some lawyers. The INTA people and the
lawyers started getting fat off us. Many lawyers wanted to help us
and offered us different sorts of help. They said we were doing
the right thing. The peasants trusted them but realized afterwards
that they made them pay through the nose, even for a simple
signature. My father dedicated himself entirely to our community’s
problems. The INTA told my father: ‘You must get engineers to
measure the land and then you’ll be the owners of the land you
live on. Don’t worry, grow what you want. Don’t worry, go ahead
and clear the undergrowth because the land is yours.’ With this
encouragement, my father went home and called meetings in the
village.
We were very happy and went on working until the landowners
arrived with their engineers again. Our little bit of land has
probably been measured something like twenty times, if I’m not
mistaken. Engineers after engineers. What I can’t forgive, and
this is something that has contributed to my hate for these
people, is that they said they came to help us. My father, mother,
all the community, were very distressed. They were ladinos.
They couldn’t eat our food, our tortillas with salt. If
we didn’t feed them well they would probably favour the
landowners. So we treated them very well, out of fear. We gave
them our best, our fattest animals. We’d kill chickens for them to
eat. Our community, which never bought so much as a bottle of oil,
had to buy them rice, oil, eggs, chickens, meat. We had to buy
coffee and sugar, because they couldn’t eat panela. Our
community never ate these things. We all had to go to town. The
village got together, gave in their ten centavos and with
this collection we bought what was needed. Earning ten centavos
is hard for us, it’s earned by a lot of sweat. It was worse
when the inspectors stayed a whole week. When they left, the
village breathed a sigh of relief and we were much poorer. We
didn’t eat meat. They did. They got their information with no
difficulty. They went to the further points of our land and, of
course, needed someone to go with them. But our people have no
time to spare. It was my father who gave up his time because he
loved the community, even if it meant we often had nothing to eat
at home. My mother felt responsible for looking after these men.
She saw how in need our neighbours were. So my mother stayed at
home and said to us, ‘You children go and work because I have to
attend to these men.’ My parents attended to them because, as
leaders of the community, it was their responsibility–they were
the most important people in the village. They looked after them
very well. My mother even made them small tortillas because
they couldn’t eat our large ones. She had to make ones to suit
them. So neither of my parents could work while those men were
there. Our neighbours contributed what they could, but they didn’t
have very much. We couldn’t speak Spanish. My father spoke a
little, just enough to understand the inspectors. The INTA used to
send for him. They sometimes made him go to Quetzaltenango,
Huehuetenango, El Quiché or to the capital just to sign a piece of
paper. You can imagine the cost of those journeys in food and
transport. And on top of all this, we had to pay the lawyers who
shuffle the papers.
The government says the land belongs to the nation. It owns the
land and gives it to us to cultivate. But when we’ve cleared and
cultivated the land, that’s when the landowners appear. However,
the landowners don’t just appear on their own–they have
connections with the different authorities that allow them to
maneuver like that. Because of this, we faced the Martínez family,
the Garcías, and then the Brols arrived. This meant we could
either stay and work as peónes or leave our land. There
was no other solution. So my father travelled all over the place
seeking advice. We didn’t realize then that going to the
government authorities was the same as going to the landowners.
They are the same. My father was tireless in his efforts to seek
help. He went to other sectors, like the workers’ unions. He asked
them to help because we were already being thrown off our land.
The first time they threw us out of our homes was, if I remember
rightly, in 1967. They turned us out of our houses, and out of the
village. The Garcías’ henchmen set to work with ferocity. They
were Indians too, soldiers of the finca. First they went
into the houses without permission and got all the people out.
Then they went in and threw out all our things. I remember that my
mother had her silver necklaces, precious keepsakes from my
grandmother, but we never saw them again after that. They stole
them all. They threw out our cooking utensils, our earthenware
cooking pots. We don’t use those sort of…special utensils, we have
our own earthenware pots. They hurled them into the air, and, oh
God! they hit the ground and broke into pieces. All our plates,
cups, pots. They threw them out and they all broke. That was the
vengeance of the landowner on the peasants because we wouldn’t
give up our land. […]
Those few days confirmed my hatred for those people. I saw why we
said that ladinos were thieves, criminals and liars. It
was as our parents had told us. We could see that they were doing
the same to us. They killed our animals. They killed many of our
dogs. To us, killing an animal is like killing a person. We care
for all the things of the natural world very much and killing our
dogs wounded us very deeply. We spent more than forty days in the
fields. Then the community held a meeting and said, ‘If they throw
us out again, we will die of hunger.’ We had no utensils for
cooking our tortillas, and no grinding stones. They’d been thrown
away into the undergrowth. We organized ourselves, all of us, and
said, ‘Let’s collect our things together.’ We went looking for any
of our things that were still more or less all right. My father
said, ‘If they kill us they kill us, but we’ll go back to our
houses.’ Our people looked on my father as their own father, and
so we went back to our houses. There was another village quite
near ours and they helped us. People brought cooking pots and
plates so that we could cook our maize and eat. So we went back to
our houses. And the landowners came back again for what they
called ‘collective negotiations.’ They told us we should resign
ourselves to working as peónes because the land belonged
to them. We could stay in our houses, but the land was not ours.
If we didn’t agree, they would throw us off again. But my father
said: ‘We were the first families to come and cultivate this land
and nobody can deceive us into thinking that this land is theirs.
If they want to be the owners of more land, let them go and
cultivate the mountains. There is more land but it is not land
where
things grow.’ […]
We love our land very much. Since those people tried to take our
land away, we have grieved very much. My grandfather used to cry
bitterly and say: ‘In the past, no one person owned the land. The
land belonged to everyone. There were no boundaries.’ We were
sadder still when we saw our animals going hungry because of us.
If our animals went near our crops, they were killed by the
Garcías’ henchmen who were guarding them. (I remember that the
wickedest landowner was Honorio García. The other was Angel
Martínez.) My grandfather said, ‘If they kill our animals, we must
kill them.’ That was the idea that came to my grandfather. We
spent about fifteen days away from our house, after the second
raid and our elders advised us to burn them and leave. But where
to? We didn’t know whether it was better to go to the finca or
agree to be labourers on the landowners’ estate. We couldn’t
decide. We discussed it with all our neighbours. Among the whole
community. During all this time we couldn’t celebrate our culture;
none of our ceremonies. That’s when my father took his stand. He
said, ‘If they kill me for trying to defend the land that belongs
to us, well, they’ll have to kill me.’ […]
My father went on travelling. He was hardly ever at home now. He
didn’t pay us much attention, or talk to us like he used to. He’d
arrive, call a meeting of the community, talk to them and then
sometimes leave the next day. We began to lose contact with him.
When the landowners saw my father working so hard to save our
land, they started threatening him. So he said, ‘The best
guardians, the best protection a man has, are his animals. Our
dogs must learn to defend us.’ We had some good dogs, they were
very fierce. We spent time teaching the dogs to bite those
men when they came to our houses–sometimes in the middle of the
night.
Our life was now such that we couldn’t go down to the finca because
if we did our houses probably wouldn’t be there when we got back.
The community decided to eat plants or whatever they could find in
the fields rather than go down to the finca. Or part of a
family would go and the other part would stay and watch over the
house. We became much more united. When the landowners came we’d
unite so that they either had to throw us all off, kill us all or
leave us alone. We began teaching the children to keep watch and
tell us when the landowners were coming. We lived for quite a
while like this–with all this tension. I kept on going down to the
finca with my brothers and sisters. My mother always
stayed in the house. Or my father was there. My father never went
down to the fincas because the landowners would take
advantage of this and go into the village. Then they started
trying other things. We had maize and beans but we had to carry
all our produce down from the village to the town which was a long
way away. So the landowners set up a temporary market, a place to
sell produce, and tried to isolate us from the town even more, so
that they could take over our land more easily.
Then the INTA came and told us that the problem was solved. They
said: ‘We’re going to give you a title to the land for you to sign
and the land will be yours. No-one will bother you on your land.
You can sow your crops, clear the undergrowth and go further into
the mountains. This proposal comes from the government.’ We signed
it. I remember even the children signed it. We can’t sign with a
pen or a pencil. We signed it in ink with our fingerprints on the
paper. My father insisted they read the paper out even though we
didn’t understand it all. We did understand some. But they didn’t
want to read it. The INTA inspectors said we could rely on the
paper, it was the title to the land. So we signed it.
They left us alone for two and a half years, I think it was, to
let us calm down. Our people went on working. We hardly ever went
down to the finca now so that we could cultivate more
land. We tried to clear large areas of the undergrowth, into the
mountains. We had a dream, a real dream. In five or eight years
our land would yield its fruit. Two and a half years went by when
we saw the engineers on our land again, shouting, measuring, with
the landowners’ guards. Now, not only the Martínez and the
Garcías, but the Brols were all measuring part of our land. This
time the problem was more complicated because they brought with
them the document we had signed, which said we had agreed to stay
on the land and live off its produce for two years only; that when
the two years were up, we had another place to go to and would
leave the land. This wasn’t true. We didn’t know what it was we
had signed. My father said, ‘This is unjust, because we were
deceived.’
This is how my father started getting more deeply involved with
the unions. I remember my father asked some unions in the FASGUA,
Federación Autónoma Sindical de Guatemala–Guatemalan Federation
of Independent Unions–to help us because they
were unions for workers, for labourers, and we were
peasants–agricultural labourers. The unions helped us a lot. They
said they would denounce the fact that we were being thrown off
our land. My father was continually going to see the unions, the
INTA, the lawyers. It nearly drove him mad. He told us, ‘My
children, you must get to know the places I go to because
otherwise, if they kill me the community will lose its land.’ Very
well. One of my older brothers began to travel with my father and
began learning Spanish. The community had to contribute to my
father’s fares. He very often had no money at all and my mother
had to sell our animals to pay for his trips. But at least we
didn’t leave our land. My mother thought about us more and more
because, of course, they were growing up. They wondered how much
their children would suffer afterwards. The whole community
wondered.
When my father started going to the unions and getting their
support, the landowners offered a great deal of money to the judge
who dealt with land claims, and my father was arrested. They
accused him of ‘compromising the sovereignty of the state.’ He was
endangering the ‘sovereignty and the well-being of the
Guatemalans’! They put him in prison. I remember that I’d been
working as a maid for a year. I’d saved a little money to take
home as a surprise for my family, especially my mother. I’d saved
it so that my mother wouldn’t have to go to the finca for
a couple of months. My brother told me: ‘They’re asking for money.
We don’t know what to do.’ I decided to leave my job and go back
to the finca. From the money I’d saved and my brothers’
wages in the finca, we had to pay for witnesses, lawyers,
documents, secretaries. There were so many things we had to pay
for to be able to get to see the authorities. Since we didn’t
speak Spanish, we had to find an intermediary to translate my
mother’s statements. The lawyer was a ladino and didn’t
understand our language, so we had to get an intermediary to
interpret for him. From the beginning the landowners paid the
interpreter not to say what we said. The interpreter ‘sold
himself’ to the landowners and, instead of our statements, he said
something else. They played so many tricks on us. The result was
that our lawyer had nothing to do because, according to the
interpreter, we ourselves acknowledged that the land belonged to
those landowners. They had paid us to cultivate the land. That
wasn’t true. We were very afraid that they would send my father to
the state prison. As long as he was in the local prison, his case
wasn’t so serious, but once he got to the state prison, the one in
El Quiché, we’d have no way of preventing him from having to carry
out the sentence he’d been given. If he went to the
criminals’ prison, as the authorities in Quetzaltenango said, it
meant he would be in jail for eighteen years or more. […]
[…] They made my father make an endless stream of statements.
Every five days they took him before the judge and asked him the
same things to see if he’d changed his mind or changed the
statement justifying his case. That is to say, the judges had no
valid justification, so they were looking for something to appease
the landowners. The landowners arrived with more and more money to
pressurize the judges into ‘selling’ my father and keeping him in
prison like a criminal. We were very unhappy because we didn’t see
our mother or our father as we were working all the time in the finca.
In the end, we managed to get him out. Papá was in prison for a
year and two months. His enemies were furious when he came out. He
came out so happy and determined to fight. He said: ‘Our ancestors
were never cowardly. And prison doesn’t eat people. Prison is a
punishment for the poor, but it doesn’t eat people. I must go home
and go on fighting.’ He didn’t rest for a minute. That’s how he
maintained his contacts with the unions and gained their support.
[…]
My father was away travelling for three months after he got out of
prison. Then they kidnapped him and we said, ‘They’ll have
finished him off.’ In those days, they were criminals, but a
different sort. The landowners’ henchmen kidnapped my father near
our house on the path going to town. One of my brothers was with
him as we hardly ever let him go alone after they’d threatened so
often to kill him. We were worried. So even if it meant less work,
it was better for the community if someone went with him. He
always went with a neighbour or one of his children. My brother
escaped and immediately mobilized the whole village. They couldn’t
take him very far because we cut off the paths right away. We used
weapons, our everyday weapons, for the first time. The people took
machetes, sticks, hoes and stones to fight the guards. They would
have beaten or killed any of them, they were so angry. Around
midday we found my father. He’d been tortured and abandoned. There
was no sign of the torturers but we knew they were the landowners’
guards. My father was on the ground. They had torn off the hair on
his head on one side. His skin was cut all over and they’d broken
so many of his bones that he couldn’t walk, lift himself or move a
single finger. He looked as if he was dying. It was almost
unbearable for us. The community made him one of those chairs the
people use for carrying their wounded and we took him down to the
town. He was almost cold. He was almost dead when we arrived at
the health centre but they wouldn’t attend to him there because
the landowners had got there before us and paid them not to look
after my father. They’d given the doctors money so none of them
would see my father. All the doctors were ladinos. So my
mother had to call an ambulance from Santa Cruz del Quiché, which
took him to a hospital called San Juan de Dios in El Quiché. He
arrived there half dead. They gave him serum and said he’d have to
stay there for about nine months for some of the very badly
damaged parts of his body to heal. They’d broken many of his bones
and he was an old man so they wouldn’t mend quickly. More
bitterness for my mother. She had to go to El Quiché and look
after my father. She worked there to pay for his medicine and some
special care.
My brothers and sisters decided not to go down to the finca now.
They said: ‘From now on we’ll stay here, even if we starve to
death, because we have to cultivate our land. We’ll try and grow
enough crops to live on and not go to the finca.’ My
mother used to come once every fifteen days perhaps. She’d stay a
day and then go back. We had a little sister and we looked after
her so that my mother didn’t have to take her with her. Some
neighbours had a little goat which gave milk. We gave her goat’s
milk because we didn’t have any cows. My little sister was about
one and a half then. Later on we received another threat. A
message came saying that they were going to kidnap my father from
the hospital. The community was frightened and said it would be
better for him to come home and be looked after here where they
couldn’t kidnap him. We told my mother straight away. One of my
brothers went to El Quiché to warn her about the message we’d
received. With the help of the priests and nuns, who gave us
money, we put my father in a secret place where the landowners
couldn’t find him. He was in the hospital of San Juan de Dios for
six months and in the other place for another five months. After
that he came home but he was in so much pain that he was never his
old self again. He couldn’t carry things; he couldn’t walk very
well and it was a big effort for him to walk to the town. At night
he couldn’t sleep because his bones ached and all the parts where
he’d been beaten hurt him. […]
Then in 1977, my father was put in prison again. They wouldn’t
leave us in peace. After my father came out of hospital and
returned home, they kept on threatening him because they knew as
long as the community was united they couldn’t send their
engineers to the villages. We would use machetes or stones. So
they went on threatening my father and said they were going to
catch him on the road again and kill him. But my father said:
‘They are cowards, they just talk, they never do it.’ But it
worried us a lot because it would be very difficult for us if they
did. That was when my father started advising us not to put our
trust in him alone but in the whole community. ‘I’m your father
now,’ he said, ‘but afterwards the community will be your father.’
He went on travelling and refused to keep quiet. He went on doing
his work. It was in 1977 that they arrested him again and sent him
to prison.
I was learning some Spanish at the time with the priests and nuns.
I used to travel too. The priests helped me to go to the capital
and stay with the nuns in a convent for a few days. When my father
came out of hospital, I started travelling with him too, to get to
know the circles he moved in. We were already thinking about my
father’s death. They could kill him any minute, so we needed to
know where it was he went. I began accompanying him all the time.
The community, the priests and some friends of my father helped
us. Some Europeans were helping us too. They sent us a lot of
money. They were people who had worked for a time teaching the
peasants how to farm. But the way they plant isn’t the way we do
it. Indians reject the chemical fertilizers they tried to teach us
about. They weren’t really welcomed so they left, but they were
very good friends of my father and helped us. They knew the
problems of our village. They went back to their country but they
still love Guatemala and help my father. […]
When my father was arrested the second time, they considered him a
political prisoner. The case against him was much worse this time.
Now that he was a political prisoner, he was sentenced to life
imprisonment. He was a communist, a subversive, they said. The
same military commissioners as the first time came and got him
from our house with clubs and took him to prison. They beat him
and tied him up. He was a political prisoner. This was much worse
for him. But by now the community was more aware of all these
things. They had their own means of self-defence against the
landowners. My brothers now spoke a bit of Spanish and my mother
had also learned something from all the suffering, all the knocks,
all the responsibility she’d had. We also had the support of the
priests, the nuns, the unions and our community. It wasn’t just my
father now, it was a whole people behind him. My father was well
known and well loved in many places so there was a big protest
against my father’s arrest. The unions especially pressed for his
release. They still wanted witnesses, lawyers and all those things
of course, but my father was soon out of prison. They started
threatening him again even before he was out. They said if he
continued his work, he would be assassinated and this time if they
couldn’t kill him they’d kill one of his children. This was his
death sentence from the authorities. Of course, the authorities
didn’t exactly say that they would kill him, but they
said the landowners would take care of it.
He was in prison for fifteen days. Then he came home. He was very
proud and very happy because in prison he’d met another prisoner
who really was a political prisoner. He was someone who
defended the peasants and he told my father the peasants should
unite and form a peasants’ league to reclaim their lands. He said
it wasn’t our problem alone: our enemies weren’t the landowners
but the whole system. This man saw things more clearly than my
father. So my father came back very proudly and said, ‘We must
fight the rich because they have become rich with our land, our
crops.’ That was when my father started to join up with other
peasants and discussed the creation of the CUC with them. A lot of
peasants had been discussing the committee but nothing concrete
had been done, so my father joined the CUC and helped them
understand things more clearly. My father didn’t have to be told
how to organize. Many peasants had been thinking of how they would
form the CUC, so, in fact, the peasants had already shown they
were unhappy with their situation.
My father was in clandestinity from 1977 onwards; that is, he was
in hiding. He left our house so he wouldn’t involve us. He left
his family and went to work with the peasants in other regions. He
came back now and again but had to come via the mountains because
if he passed through the town the landowners would know he was at
home. It was very sad for us that he couldn’t live with us at
home. He came at night and left at night. Or he spent several days
at home but didn’t go out. Our community suffered a great deal
because they loved him as if he were their own father. Everything
in our life is like a film. Constant suffering. We began thinking,
with the help of other friends, other compañeros, that our
enemies were not only the landowners who lived near us, and above
all not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us
little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been
killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger,
poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and
came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership
of land. The best land was not in our hands. It belonged to the
big landowners. Every time they see that we have new land, they
try to throw us off it or steal it from us in other ways.
***
The CUC started growing;
it spread like fire among the peasants in Guatemala. We began to
understand that the
root of all our problems was exploitation. That there were rich
and poor and that the rich exploited the poor–our
sweat, our labour. That’s how they got richer and richer. The fact
that we were always waiting in offices, always
bowing to the authorities, was part of the discrimination we
Indians suffered. So was the cultural oppression which
tries to divide us by taking away our traditions and prevents
unity among our people. The situation got worse when
the murderous generals came to power, although I didn’t actually
know who was the president at the time. […]
Later I had the opportunity of meeting other Indians, Achi
Indians, the group that lives the closest to us. And I got
to know some Mam Indians too. They all told me: ‘The rich are bad.
But not all ladinos are bad.’ And I started
wondering: ‘Could it be that not all ladinos are bad?’ I
used to think they were all bad. But they said that they lived
with poor ladinos. There were poor ladinos as
well as rich ladinos, and they were exploited as well.
That’s when I
began recognizing exploitation. I kept on going down to the finca
but now I really wanted to find out, to prove if
that was true and learn all the details. There were poor ladinos
in the finca. They worked the same, and their
children’s bellies were swollen like my little brother’s. So I
said: ‘It must be true, then, that not all ladinos are
bad.’ I
was just beginning to speak a little Spanish in those days and I
began to talk to them. I said to one
poor ladino: ‘You’re a poor ladino, aren’t you?’
And he nearly hit me. He said: ‘What do you know about it,
Indian?’
I wondered: ‘Why is it that when I say poor ladinos are
like us, I’m spurned?’ I didn’t know then the same system
which tries to isolate us Indians also puts up barriers between
Indians and ladinos. I knew that all ladinos rejected
us
but I didn’t know why. I was more confused. I still thought all ladinos
were bad.
Soon afterwards, I was with the nuns and we went to a village in
Uspantán where mostly ladinos live. The nun asked
a little boy if they were poor and he said: ‘Yes, we’re poor but
we’re not Indians.’ That stayed with me. The nun
didn’t notice, she went on talking. She was foreign, she wasn’t
Guatemalan. She asked someone else the same
question and he said: ‘Yes, we’re poor but we’re not Indians.’ It
was very painful for me to accept that an Indian was
inferior to a ladino. I kept on worrying about it. It’s a
big barrier they’ve sown between us, between Indian
and ladino. I didn’t understand it
Source:
Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in
Guatemala, translated by Ann Wright, Verso, 1984
(https://course-resources.minerva.kgi.edu/uploaded_files/mke/nAXkZr/i-rigoberta-menchu-excerpts.pdf).