I, Rigoberta Menchu

by Rigoberta Menchu

  None of the drivers liked taking us because, naturally, we were filthy and burned from the sun. No-one wanted to drive us. The lorries belonged to the fincas, but they were driven by the recruiting agents, the caporales. These caporales are in charge of about forty people, or more or less what the lorry holds. When they get to the finca, the caporal becomes the overseer of this group. They are usually men from our villages too, but they’ve been in the army or have left the community. They start behaving like the landowners, and treat their own people badly. They shout at them and insult them. The finca offers them opportunities to get on, if they do what the landowners want. They get better wages and they have a steady job. It’s their job to order us around and keep us in line, I’d say. They’ve learned Spanish so they can act as go-betweens for the landowner and his workers, because our people don’t speak Spanish. They often take advantage of us because of this, but we can’t complain because we never see the landowner and don’t know where he lives. We see only the contracting agents and the overseers. The contracting agents fetch and carry the people from the Altiplano. The overseers stay on the fincas. One group of workers arrives, another leaves and the overseer carries on giving orders. They are in charge. When you’re working, for example, and you take a little rest, he comes and insults you. ‘Keep working, that’s what you’re paid for,’ he says. They also punish the slow workers. Sometimes we’re paid by the day, and sometimes for the amount of work done. It’s when we work by the day that we get the worst treatment. The caporal stands over you every minute to see how hard you’re working. At other times, you’re paid for what you pick. If you don’t manage to finish the amount set in a day, you have to continue the next day, but at least you can rest a bit without the overseer coming down on you. But the work is still hard whether you work by the day or by the amount.

  Before we get into the lorry in our village, the labour contractor tells us to bring with us everything we’ll need for the month on the finca; that is, plates and cups, for example. Every worker carries his plate, his cup, and his water bottle in a bag on his back so he can go and get his tortilla at mealtimes. Children who don’t work don’t earn, and so are not fed. They don’t need plates. They share with their parents. The little ones who do earn also have plates for their ration of tortilla. When I wasn’t earning anything, my mother used to give me half her ration. All the mothers did the same. We get tortilla and beans free, but they are often rotten. If the food varies a bit and we get an egg about every two months, then it is deducted from our pay. Any change in the food is deducted.

  The same goes for anything we get from the cantina. As well as alcohol, the cantina in the finca also sells things that children like: sweets, cakes and soft drinks. It’s all in the shop.

  The children, who are hot and tired and hungry, are always asking their parents for treats and it makes parents sad to see their children asking for things they can’t give. But everything they buy is marked up on an account, and at the end when you get your pay, you always owe so much for food, so much at the shop, so much at the pharmacy. You end up owing a lot. For example, if a child unintentionally breaks a branch of a coffee bush, you have to work to make it up. They deduct for everything and you end up having to pay debts before you can leave.

  Every finca in Guatemala has a cantina, owned by the landowner, where the workers get drunk on alcohol and all kinds of guaro, and pile up debts. They often spend most of their wages. They drink to get happy and to forget the bitterness they feel at having to leave their villages in the Altiplano and come and work so brutally hard on the fincas for so little. I remember my father and mother going to the cantina out of despair. It was sometimes terrible for us. My mother and my brothers and sisters often had to bear all our household costs when the month on the finca was over because my father owed all his wages to the cantina. He was a very sensitive man. When anything went wrong or when times were very hard for us, he used to drink to forget. But he hurt himself twice over because his money went back to the landowner. That’s why the landowner set up the cantina anyway. Once I remember my father working the whole day picking cotton but somehow didn’t pick the required amount. He was so angry that he just wanted to forget everything and spent the whole night in the cantina. When the month was up, he owed nearly all his wage to the cantina. We honestly don’t know if he really drank all that rum or not, but it was awful to see such a huge debt chalked up against him after a whole month’s work. You get into debt for every little thing. This taught us to be very careful. My mother used to say: ‘Don’t touch anything or we’ll have to pay for it.’ My mother used to see that we all behaved ourselves and didn’t get her into debt.

  This is what happened that time we were thrown out of the finca. (We were told by one of our neighbours who stayed on there.) When they came to get paid at the end of the month, the overseer included my mother and my brother and me, and a neighbour who was thrown out with us, in the list of workers to be paid, just as if we were finishing the month and collecting our wages. Of course, he collected the pay due to us himself. That’s what they do. With what they earn and what they steal from our people, the overseers buy lovely houses in the Altiplano and have houses in other places too. They can live wherever they want to, in the places they like best.

  Many of them are ladinos from Oriente.* But there are also many of our people from the Altiplano among them. My father used to call them ‘ladinized Indians’. When we say ‘ladinized’ we mean they act like ladinos, bad ladinos, because afterwards we realized that not all ladinos are bad. A bad ladino is one who knows how to talk and steal from the people. He is a small-scale picture of the landowner.

  I remember going along in the lorry and wanting to set it on fire so that we would be allowed to rest. What bothered me most was travelling on and on and on, wanting to urinate and not being able to because the lorry wouldn’t stop. The drivers were sometimes drunk, boozed. They stopped a lot on the way but they didn’t let us get out. This enraged us; we hated the drivers because they wouldn’t let us get out although they used to drink on the way. It made me very angry and I used to ask my mother: ‘Why do we go to the finca?’. And my mother used to say: ‘Because we have to. When you’re older you’ll understand why we need to come.’ I did understand, but the thing was I was fed up with it all. When I was older, I didn’t find it strange any more. Slowly I began to see what we had to do and why things were like that. I realised we weren’t alone in our sorrow and suffering, but that a lot of people, in many different regions, shared it with us.

  When we worked down on the cotton plantation (I think I was about twelve) I was already big and did the work of a grown woman. I remember the first time I saw a finca landowner, I was frightened of him because he was very fat. I’d never seen a ladino like that. He was very fat, well dressed and even had a watch. We didn’t know about watches then. I didn’t have any shoes although many of our people wore caitos; but nothing which compared to the shoes this landowner had. At dawn the overseer told us: ‘Listen, you’re going to work one more day at the end of the month.’ Whenever anything like this happened, they’d just announce they were adding another day on to the month. If the month had thirty-one days, we had to work the first day of the next month, or if there were rest days for any reason, we’d have to make up the day. So the overseer told us: ‘The owner is coming today to thank you for your work and wants to spend some time talking to you, so nobody leave because we have to wait for him.’ So we stayed in our camp, in the workers’ barracks where we lived and they divided us into groups. Then, when the great landowner arrived, we saw he was accompanied by about fifteen soldiers. This seemed really stupid to me, because I thought they were pointing their rifles at the landowner, so I asked my mother: ‘Why are they forcing the landowner to come and see us?’ But it was really to protect him. There were about fifteen soldiers and they found a suitable place for the owner to sit. The overseer said: ‘Some of you have to dance for the owner.’ My mother said no, and hid us.
They wanted the children to prepare a sort of welcome for the owner. But none of us dared even go near him because he had so many bodyguards with guns. When the owner began to speak, he spoke in Spanish. My mother understood a little Spanish and afterwards she told us he was talking about the elections. But we didn’t even understand what our parents told us–that the ladinos had a government. That is, the President who had been in power all this time, was, for my parents, for all of us, President of the ladinos’ government. It wasn’t the government of our country. That’s what we always thought. So my mother said that he was talking about the government of the ladinos. What was it he was saying? The landowner was speaking, and the overseer started translating what he was saying. They told us he said we all had to go and make a mark on a piece of paper. That would be a vote, I imagine that it was a vote. We all went to make our mark on the paper. They gave my father one and my mother and showed them the place to put their mark. I remember that the paper had some squares with three or four drawings on it. So my parents and my older brothers and sisters marked the paper in the place the owner told them. He warned us that anyone who didn’t mark the paper would be thrown out of work at the end of the month. Anyone who was thrown out would not be paid. The workers were forced to mark the paper. So that was another day of rest, and it meant we would have to work the second day of the next month as well. The landowner left, but afterwards…I dreamed about him over and over again…it must have been the fear, the impression made on me by that man’s face. I remember telling mother: ‘I dreamed about that old ladino who came here.’ And mother said: ‘Don’t be silly, he’s only a man, don’t be afraid.’ That’s what she said. But all the children there ran away from their parents and cried when they saw that ladino, and even more at the soldiers and their weapons. They thought they were going to kill their parents. I thought so, too. I thought they were going to kill everybody, because they were carrying guns.

  We didn’t even know what the name on the paper was. My father sometimes used to tell us names because of the things he remembered. In the defeat of 1954, he said they captured men from our region, and from other regions. They took our men off to the barracks. My father was one of those caught. He has very black memories of those days. He says many, many of our people died and we only escaped because of our own quick wits. That’s how we survived, my father said. His memories of this period are very bad. He always talked about the President there was then, but we didn’t know any of the others. We didn’t know the rest, not their names or what they were like. We knew nothing about them. Then the landowner came to congratulate us. We saw him a second time. He came with his wife and one of his sons. They were nearly as fat as he was. They came to the finca and told us that our President had won, the one we had voted for. We didn’t even know that they were votes they’d taken away. My parents laughed when they heard them say ‘our President’, because for us he was the President of the ladinos, not ours at all. This was my impression as a small girl and I thought a lot about what the President would be like. I thought he was an even bigger man than the landowner. The landowner was very big and tall, and we didn’t have big men like that in our village. So I thought that the President was even taller than the landowner. When I was older, I met the landowner again and he asked my parents for me. That was when I was sent to the capital. That’s another stage in my life.

  V

  FIRST VISIT TO GUATEMALA CITY

  ‘When I went to the city for the first time, I saw it as a monster, something alien, different.’

  —Rigoberta Menchú

  I felt grown-up for the first time when at the age of seven I got lost in the mountains. That was the time when we came back from the finca to the Altiplano and my brothers and sisters and I all fell ill. We’d got back from the finca in an awful state. When our money ran out, my father said if we went back down to the finca with sick children, he’d be left alone to bury his children there. So he said: ‘The only thing to do is to go up into the mountains and collect mimbre.’ My elder brothers and sisters, my father and myself. In fact, we children often went up to collect mimbre when we had some spare time because it grows near where we live. My father also went whenever he had a moment, or a week without other work. So we all went to cut mimbre. In a week, between the lot of us, we collected a quintal (a hundredweight) of mimbre. Then it was dried. We pulled it along with ropes and collected it together. Some of us stripped the bark off and some rolled it up. We’d gone further up into the mountains that time and up there if you’re not careful you can get lost. We had a dog with us as a guide. He used to look out for animals and knew the way. That dog used to guide us everywhere in the mountains. Anyway, the blessed dog saw we didn’t have any food; we’d finished the food because we’d been in the mountains for over eight days. The poor dog was hungry, so one night he went back home. He’d gone before we realized it. We’d no idea where we were. It was the rainy season: June or July, if I remember right. So there were lots of black clouds and we couldn’t get our bearings. My father was very worried because if we stayed in the mountains, we could be attacked by wild animals. How were we going to find the path? So we started walking and walking, on and on. We didn’t know if we were going further into the mountains or out of them. We couldn’t hear the noise of animals from any of the villages. We couldn’t hear any dogs barking. Usually when dogs bark in any village, the sound carries a long way in the mountains. But there was nothing. And then, the others were so busy looking for the path, they forgot about me and I was left behind. I didn’t know which way to go and my father was almost in tears looking for me. In the mountains, it’s the one furthest ahead who decides the path: he opens the way for the others to pass, and that’s how we were going along, in a line. Since I was the smallest, and my brothers and sisters were so tired and annoyed from having to walk so much, they didn’t want to be bothered with me and so I dropped back and got further and further behind. I started shouting but no-one heard me, they just went walking on. I had to follow the trail they made, but there came a moment when I just couldn’t see the way they had gone. My father turned back to find me but he couldn’t find the same path back and so they lost me for seven hours. I was crying, shouting, but no-one heard me. That was the first time I felt what it must be like to be an adult; I felt I had to be more responsible, more like my brothers and sisters. When they found me, they all started telling me off, that it was my fault, that I didn’t even know how to walk. So we were walking like this for three days without anything to eat. We cut bojónes and ate the tender part of the plant, as if we were chewing meat. We were getting weaker and weaker, and still had to carry all the mimbre we’d cut. And that’s when that damned dog–perhaps because he realized we were near the village–came to meet us. He came to meet us so happily, but we could have killed him, we were so angry. My mother and all our neighbours were very worried. They didn’t know what to do because they knew that if we got lost in the mountains, a lot of them would have to go out and look for us. Of course, with the dog they would have found us, but they were still waiting in the village, all very angry. It’s something I’ve never forgotten, because of the anger I felt at the way we live. After all the work we put into cutting the mimbre, we couldn’t carry it all, especially when it rained. We had to throw away some of what we’d cut and got back to the village with only some of it. In those days, in the capital they used to pay us fifty quetzals for each quintal of mimbre. So for five or six members of the family working the whole week, all day long, up the mountains, we got fifty quetzals the quintal. On top of that we had to meet all the costs of transport from our village to the town and from the town to the capital.

  So we set off for the capital. My father loved me very much and I was very fond of him, so it always fell to me to travel with him and share his suffering with him. We arrived in the capital. In those days it made me really angry that I couldn’t understand what my father and the man he wanted to sell the mimbre to were saying to each other. The man was tel
ling him he had no money and wouldn’t buy the mimbre. He was a carpenter, an old man. In Guatemala they still use mimbre for furniture and it’s usually the carpenters, especially carpenters in Antigua,* who buy the mimbre to make their special kind of open wickerwork. So we went there and I could see the gestures the men were making to my father but I didn’t know what they were saying. Afterwards my father was very worried because they wouldn’t buy the mimbre. We went looking for other buyers but for us the capital is like another world: one we don’t know, because we live in the mountains. In the end, my father had to leave the mimbre with the first man who only paid him half what he asked. And we went back home with only 25 quetzals. After so much work! We returned home and it was awful because we found my mother had been really counting on our work and thought we were coming back with a lot of money. And we had hardly any. My poor mother nearly died of anger and rage at the fact that after all our suffering we hadn’t any money. She felt sorry for all us children because she knew the hunger and cold we’d gone through collecting the mimbre. In the end, we were forced to go back to the finca to get a bit of money together.

  Sometimes we took mountain mushrooms and herbs from the fields to town as well. We sold them and came back with a few centavos in our hands. But for us children, our work was mainly collecting mimbre.

  My first visit to the capital was a big step in my life. I was my father’s favourite; I went with him everywhere. It was the first time that I’d been in a truck with windows. We were used to travelling in closed lorries, as if we were in an oven with all the people and animals. It was the first time I’d ever sat on a seat in a truck–and one with windows. I didn’t want to get in at first, because it wasn’t like the trucks I knew. So my father said: ‘I’ll hold you tight, don’t worry. We’ll get there all right.’ He gave me a sweet so I’d get into the truck. And so we set off. I remember the truck starting up…I hardly slept at all looking at the countryside we passed through from Uspantán to the capital. It impressed me very much, it was wonderful to see everything along the way–towns, mountains, houses very different from our own. It made me very happy, but also a bit frightened because I thought, as the truck pulled away, that we would go over into the ravine. When we reached the capital, I saw cars for the first time. I thought they were animals just going along. It didn’t occur to me they were cars. I asked my father: ‘What are they?’ ‘They’re the same as the big lorries, only smaller,’ he said, ‘and they’re for people who only want to carry small loads.’ ‘What we go to the finca in, what the workers ride in, is a lorry for our people,’ my father said, ‘and what we’re travelling in now is what people go to the capital in, just to travel, not to work. And those little ones, they belong to rich people to use just for themselves. They don’t have things to carry.’ When I first saw them, I thought that the cars would all bump into each other, but they hardly did at all. When one stopped, they all had to stop. It was all so amazing for me. I remember when I got home telling my brothers and sisters what the cars were like, how they were driven, and that they didn’t crash into one another or kill anyone, and a whole load of other things as well. I had a long tale to tell at home.