I, Rigoberta Menchu Read online

  I, Rigoberta Menchú

  I, Rigoberta Menchú

  An Indian woman in Guatemala

  Edited and Introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

  Translated by Ann Wright

  Translation © Verso 1984

  First published as Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú Y Asi Me Nació La Concienca

  © Editions Gallimard and Elisabeth Burgos 1983

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Verso

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  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN: 978-1-84467-471-8

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s note

  Introduction

  I The family

  II Birth ceremonies

  III The nahual

  IV First visit to the finca. Life in the finca

  V First visit to Guatemala City

  VI An eight-year-old agricultural worker

  VII Death of her little brother in the finca. Difficulty of communicating with other Indians

  VIII Life in the Altiplano. Rigoberta’s tenth birthday

  IX Ceremonies for sowing time and harvest. Relationships with the earth

  X The natural world. The earth, mother of man

  XI Marriage ceremonies

  XII Life in the community

  XIII Death of her friend by poisoning

  XIV A maid in the capital

  XV Conflict with the landowners and the creation of the CUC

  XVI Period of reflection on the road to follow

  XVII Self-defence in the village

  XVIII The Bible and self-defence: the examples of Judith, Moses and David

  XIX Attack on the village by the army

  XX The death of Doña Petrona Chona

  XXI Farewell to the community: Rigoberta decides to learn Spanish

  XXII The CUC comes out into the open

  XXIII Political activity in other communities. Contacts with ladinos

  XXIV The torture and death of her little brother, burnt alive in front of members of his family and the community

  XXV Rigoberta’s father dies in the occupation of the Spanish embassy. Peasants march to the capital

  XXVI Rigoberta talks about her father

  XXVII Kidnapping and death of Rigoberta’s mother

  XXVIII Death

  XXIX Fiestas and Indian queens

  XXX Lessons taught her by her mother: Indian women and ladino women

  XXXI Women and political commitment. Rigoberta renounces marriage and motherhood

  XXXII Strike of agricultural workers and the First of May in the capital

  XXXIII In hiding in the capital. Hunted by the army

  XXXIV Exile

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Further Reading

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Rigoberta’s narration reflects the different influences on her life. It is a mixture of Spanish learned from nuns and full of biblical associations; of Spanish learned in the political struggle replete with revolutionary terms; and, most of all, Spanish which is heavily coloured by the linguistic constructions of her native Quiché and full of the imagery of nature and community traditions.

  She has learned the language of the culture which oppresses her in order to fight it–to fight for her people–and to help us understand her own world. In doing so, she has created a form of expression which is full of passion, poetry and wisdom. Sometimes, however, the wealth of memories and associations which come tumbling out in this spontaneous narrative leave the reader a little confused as to chronology and details of events.

  The problem of translation was how to retain the vitality, and often beautiful simplicity, of Rigoberta’s words, but aim for clarity at the same time. I have tried, as far as possible, to stay with Rigoberta’s original phrasing; changing and reordering only where I thought the meaning could not be readily understood. Hence, I’ve left the repetitions, tense irregularities, and sometimes convoluted sentences which come from Rigoberta’s search to find the right expression in Spanish. Words have been left in Spanish or Quiché, where they are objects or concepts for which we have no precise equivalent. The two most obvious words in this category are ladino and compañero. Although ladino ostensibly means a person of mixed race or a Spanish-speaking Indian, in this context it also implies someone who represents a system which oppresses the Indian–first under Spanish rule and then under the succession of brutal governments of the landed oligarchy. So a word like ‘half-caste’ would be inadequate. Hence Rigoberta’s father’s invention ‘ladinizar’ (to ladinize, or become like a ladino) which is a mixture of ladino and latinizar (to latinize), and has both racial and religious connotations. I think it is clear that the word compañero, which literally means companion, changes its meaning during the book. Rigoberta initially uses it for her friends, and her neighbours in the community. But as the political commitment of both Rigoberta and her village grows, it becomes ‘comrade’, a fellow fighter in the struggle. She uses it for the militants in the trade unions, the CUC and the political organisations. The compañeros de la montana are the guerrillas. From these two words comes the rather unwieldy compañero ladino.

  Rigoberta has a mission. Her words want us to understand and react. I only hope that I have been able to do justice to the power of their message. I will have done that if I can convey the impact they had on me when first I read them.

  Ann Wright

  INTRODUCTION

  This book tells the life story of Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiché Indian woman and a member of one of the largest of the twenty-two ethnic groups in Guatemala. She was born in the hamlet of Chimel, near San Miguel de Uspantán, which is the capital of the north-western province of El Quiché.

  Rigoberta Menchú is twenty-three years old. She tells her story in Spanish, a language which she has spoken for only three years. Her life story is an account of contemporary history rather than of Guatemala itself. It is in that sense that it is exemplary: she speaks for all the Indians of the American continent. What she tells us of her relationship with nature, life, death and her community has already been said by the Indians of North America, those of Central America and those of South America. The cultural discrimination she has suffered is something that all the continent’s Indians have been suffering ever since the Spanish conquest. The voice of Rigoberta Menchú allows the defeated to speak. She is a privileged witness: she has survived the genocide that destroyed her family and community and is stubbornly determined to break the silence and to confront the systematic extermination of her people. She refuses to let us forget. Words are her only weapons. That is why she resolved to learn Spanish and break out of the linguistic isolation into which the Indians retreated in order to preserve their culture.

  Rigoberta learned the language of her oppressors in order to use it against them. For her, appropriating the Spanish language is an act which can change the course of history because it is the result of a decision: Spanish was a language which was forced upon her, but it has become a weapon in her struggle. She decided to speak in order to tell of the oppression her people have been suffering for almost five hundred years, so that the sacrifices made by her community and her family will not have been made in vain.

  She will
not let us forget and insists on showing us what we have always refused to see. We Latin Americans are only too ready to denounce the unequal relations that exist between ourselves and North America, but we tend to forget that we too are oppressors and that we too are involved in relations that can only be described as colonial. Without any fear of exaggeration, it could be said that, especially in countries with a large Indian population, there is an internal colonialism which works to the detriment of the indigenous population. The ease with which North America dominates so-called ‘Latin’ America is to a large extent a result of the collusion afforded it by this internal colonialism. So long as these relations persist, the countries of Latin America will not be countries in any real sense of the word, and they will therefore remain vulnerable. That is why we have to listen to Rigoberta Menchú’s appeal and allow ourselves to be guided by a voice whose inner cadences are so pregnant with meaning that we actually seem to hear her speaking and can almost hear her breathing. Her voice is so heart-rendingly beautiful because it speaks to us of every facet of the life of a people and their oppressed culture. But Rigoberta Menchú’s story does not consist solely of heart-rending moments. Quietly, but proudly, she leads us into her own cultural world, a world in which the sacred and the profane constantly mingle, in which worship and domestic life are one and the same, in which every gesture has a pre-established purpose and in which everything has a meaning. Within that culture, everything is determined in advance; everything that occurs in the present can be explained in terms of the past and has to be ritualized so as to be integrated into everyday life, which is itself a ritual. As we listen to her voice, we have to look deep into our own souls for it awakens sensations and feelings which we, caught up as we are in an inhuman and artificial world, thought were lost for ever. Her story is overwhelming because what she has to say is simple and true. As she speaks, we enter a strikingly different world which is poetic and often tragic, a world which has forged the thought of a great popular leader. In telling the story of her life, Rigoberta Menchú is also issuing a manifesto on behalf of an ethnic group. She proclaims her allegiance to that group, but she also asserts her determination to subordinate her life to one thing. As a popular leader, her one ambition is to devote her life to overthrowing the relations of domination and exclusion which characterize internal colonialism. She and her people are taken into account only when their labour power is needed; culturally, they are discriminated against and rejected. Rigoberta Menchú’s struggle is a struggle to modify and break the bonds that link her and her people to the ladinos, and that inevitably implies changing the world. She is in no sense advocating a racial struggle, much less refusing to accept the irreversible fact of the existence of the ladinos. She is fighting for the recognition of her culture, for acceptance of the fact that it is different and for her people’s rightful share of power.

  In Guatemala and certain other countries of Latin America, the Indians are in the majority. The situation there is, mutatis mutandis, comparable to that in South Africa, where a white minority has absolute power over the black majority. In other Latin American countries, where the Indians are in a minority, they do not even have the most elementary rights which every human being should enjoy. Indeed, the so-called forest Indians are being systematically exterminated in the name of progress. But unlike the Indian rebels of the past, who wanted to go back to pre-Columbian times, Rigoberta Menchú is not fighting in the name of an idealized or mythical past. On the contrary, she obviously wants to play an active part in history and it is that which makes her thought so modern. She and her comrades have given their historical ambitions an organic expression in the shape of the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC) and their decision to join the ‘31 January Popular Front’, which was founded to commemorate the massacre on that date of a group of Quiché Indians who occupied the Spanish embassy Ciudad-Guatemala in order to draw attention to their plight. The group which occupied the embassy was led by Rigoberta’s father, Vicente Menchú, who has since become a national hero for the Indians of Guatemala. The Popular Front, which consists of six mass organizations and was founded in January 1981, took the name ‘31 January’ in memory of the massacre.

  Early in January 1982, Rigoberta Menchú was invited to Europe by a number of solidarity groups as a representative of the 31 January Popular Front. It was then that I met her in Paris. The idea of turning her life story into a book came from a Canadian woman friend who is very sympathetic to the cause of the Guatemalan Indians. Never having met Rigoberta, I was at first somewhat reluctant, as I realized that such projects depend to a large extent on the quality of the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. Such work has far-reaching psychological implications, and the revival of the past can resuscitate affects and zones of the memory which had apparently been forgotten for ever and can lead to anxiety and stress situations.

  As soon as we met, however, I knew that we were going to get along toegether. The admiration her courage and dignity aroused in me did much to ease our relationship.

  She came to my home one evening in January 1982. She was wearing traditional costume, including a multicoloured huipil with rich and varied embroidery; the patterns were not symmetrical and one could have been forgiven for assuming that they were random. She was also wearing an ankle-length skirt; this too was multicoloured and the thick material was obviously hand-woven. I later learned that it was called a corte. She had a broad, brightly coloured sash around her waist. On her head, she wore a fuchsia and red scarf knotted behind her neck. When she left Paris, she gave it to me, telling me that it had taken her three months to weave the cloth. Around her neck she had an enormous necklace of red beads and old silver coins with a heavy solid silver cross dangling from it. I remember it as being a particularly cold night; in fact I think it was snowing. Rigoberta was wearing no stockings and no coat. Beneath her huipil, her arms were bare. Her only protection against the cold was a short cape made from imitation traditional fabric; it barely came to her waist. The first thing that struck me about her was her open, almost childlike smile. Her face was round and moon-shaped. Her expression was as guileless as that of a child and a smile hovered permanently on her lips. She looked astonishingly young. I later discovered that her youthful air soon faded when she had to talk about the dramatic events that had overtaken her family. When she talked about that, you could see the suffering in her eyes; they lost their youthful sparkle and became the eyes of a mature woman who has known what it means to suffer. What at first looked like shyness was in fact a politeness based upon reserve and gentleness. Her gestures were graceful and delicate. According to Rigoberta, Indian children learn that delicacy from a very early age; they begin to pick coffee when they are still very young and the berries have to be plucked with great care if the branches are not to be damaged.

  I very soon became aware of her desire to talk and of her ability to express herself verbally.

  Rigoberta spent a week in Paris. In order to make things easier and to make the best possible use of her time, she came to stay with me. Every day for a week, we began to record her story at nine in the morning, broke for lunch at about one, and then continued until six in the evening. We often worked after dinner too, either making more recordings or preparing questions for the next day. At the end of the week I had twenty-four hours of conversation on tape. For the whole of that week, I lived in Rigoberta’s world. We practically cut ourselves off from the outside world. We established an excellent rapport immediately and, as the days passed and as she confided in me and told me the story of her life, her family and her community, our relationship gradually became more intense. As time went by, she became more self-assured and even began to seem contented. One day she told me that until then she had never been able to sleep all night without waking up in a panic because she had dreamed that the army was coming to arrest her.

  But I think it was mainly the fact of living together under the same roof for a week that won me her trust; it certainly brought us clos
er together. I have to admit that this was partly an accident. A woman friend had brought me some maize flour and black beans back from Venezuela. Maize and beans are the staple diet in both Venezuela and Guatemala. I cannot describe how happy that made Rigoberta. It made me happy too, as the smell of tortillas and refried beans brought back my childhood in Venezuela, where the women get up early to cook arepas* for breakfast. Arepas are much thicker than Guatemalan tortillas, but the ingredients are the same, as are the methods of cooking and preparing them. The first thing Rigoberta did when she got up in the morning was make dough and cook tortillas for breakfast; it was a reflex that was thousands of years old. She did the same at noon and in the evening. It was a pleasure to watch her. Within seconds, perfectly round, paper-thin tortillas would materialize in her hands, as though by miracle. The women I had watched in my childhood made arepas by patting the dough flat between the palms of their hands, but Rigoberta made her tortillas by patting it between her fingers, holding them straight and together and constantly passing the dough from one hand to the other. It is much more difficult to make perfectly shaped tortillas like that. The pot of black beans lasted us for several days and made up the rest of our daily menu. By chance, I had pickled some hot peppers in oil shortly before Rigoberta’s arrival. She sprinkled her beans with the oil, which almost set one’s mouth on fire. ‘We only trust people who eat what we eat’, she told me one day as she tried to explain the relationship between the guerrillas and the Indian communities. I suddenly realized that she had begun to trust me. A relationship based upon food proves that there are areas where Indians and non-Indians can meet and share things: the tortillas and black beans brought us together because they gave us the same pleasure and awakened the same drives in both of us. In terms of ladino-Indian relations, it would be foolish to deny that the ladinos have borrowed certain cultural traits from the Indians. As Linto points out, some features of the culture of the defeated always tend to be incorporated into the culture of the conqueror, usually via the economic-based slavery and concubinage that result from the exploitation of the defeated. The ladinos have adopted many features of the indigenous culture and those features have become what George Devereux calls the ‘ethnic unconscious’. The ladinos of Latin America make a point of exaggerating such features in order to set themselves apart from their original European culture: it is the only way they can proclaim their ethnic individuality. They too feel the need to be different and therefore have to differentiate themselves from the Europe that gave them their world-vision, their language and their religion. They inevitably use the native cultures of Latin America to proclaim their otherness and have always tended to adopt the great monuments of the Aztec, Mayan and Incan pre-Columbian civilizations as their own, without ever establishing any connection between the splendours of the past and the poor exploited Indians they despise and treat as slaves. Then there are the ‘indigenists’ who want to recover the lost world of their ancestors and cut themselves off completely from European culture. In order to do so, however, they use notions and techniques borrowed from that very culture. Thus, they promote the notion of an Indian nation. Indigenism is, then, itself a product of what Devereux calls ‘disassociative acculturation’: an attempt to revive the past by using techniques borrowed from the very culture one wishes to reject and free oneself from.* The indigenist meetings held in Paris–with Indian participation–are a perfect example of what he means. Just like the avant-garde groups which still take up arms in various Latin American countries–and these groups should not be confused with resistance groups fighting military dictatorships, like the Guatemalan guerrillas, the associations of the families of the ‘disappeared ones’, the countless trade union and other oppositional groups which are springing up in Chile and other countries, or the ‘Plaza de Mayo Mothers’ movement in Argentina–the indigenist groups also want to publicize their struggles in Paris. Paris is their sound box. Whatever happens in Paris has repercussions through the world, even in Latin America. Just as the groups which are or were engaged in armed struggle in America have supporters who adopt their political line, the Indians too have their European supporters, many of whom are anthropologists. I do not want to start a polemic and I do not want to devalue any one form of action; I am simply stating the facts.