I, Rigoberta Menchu

by Rigoberta Menchu

  My father was a choirboy in the church and then he got married and had children. He totally accepted what Catholic Action is all about. He used to teach us that God exists, and that one way of reaching him is by worshipping the saints. That doesn’t mean actually worshipping the saints, the images, it’s just a form of expression. For instance, the image of the earth, the mother, is very important. She is created by a father, our one God, and so are the saints, our ancestors. We express ourselves through our designs, through our dress–our huipil for instance, is like an image of our ancestors. They are like the saints of Catholic Action. This is where you see the mixture of Catholicism and our own culture. We feel very Catholic because we believe in the Catholic religion but, at the same time, we feel very Indian, proud of our ancestors.

  At first, I really didn’t understand what this whole ‘Catholic’ thing was, but I was ready to open myself to it all the same. So I began teaching the doctrine in our community. My work was mostly with the small children. The priest used to come and celebrate Mass, form groups of catechists and leave texts for them to study. But as we couldn’t read or write, we usually had to learn them by heart. That’s how we started learning a few things. My brothers learnt to read and write from my cousins about then. I’ve got cousins who were at primary school for six years but had to stop then because there was no possibility of continuing. These cousins taught my brothers to read. When my brothers were young they had lots of friends and they began to learn to read with them. But as for me, I was illiterate, and so were my friends. When I was with my friends, we don’t talk about enjoying ourselves or that sort of thing, we talk about work and the things we have to do. Even more so when we have our little animals. While we watch the animals, we talk about the things we dream of, about what we want to do with our animals. We do talk about life a bit, but only very generally. We never talk about travelling to other places, or dancing, learning to dance. We don’t talk about that. The boys do. They begin teaching each other the things they know and they start playing games. There’s an Indian game which is a bit like a sport. There’s this wax, it’s not beeswax but comes from another kind of insect found in the mountains which makes a black wax. When these insects leave their nest to make another one, the wax is left behind in the trees. So whenever they’ve a free moment, the boys love going off to the mountain to collect the wax. They bring the wax back and make little balls out of it to play with. It’s a bit like gambling. The one who wins is the one who knocks everyone else’s wax to bits. He wins a centavo or they can give him something else. This game they play with the wax is a competition. They also play the game with a centavo piece which they put on something metal and flick another coin at it. If it hits it and turns it over, then that boy wins. If it doesn’t flick over, then he doesn’t win. You can get the hang of the game with a lot of practice. The boys talk to each other a lot when they have some spare time in the mountains and they also play together in a group in the village.

  As a rule, we girls don’t play, because our mothers find it hard to let a girl go off and play on her own. Girls have to learn to look after things in the home, they must learn all the little things their mothers do. Mothers never sit around at home with nothing to do. They’re always busy. If they haven’t any specific job to do, they’ve always got their weaving, and if they haven’t any weaving, there’s always something else. So our games are mostly weaving or things like that, but at least we can do it together. There’s a place in the fields which is so wonderful and pretty and shady that all the girls get together–seven or eight of us–and sit under the trees and hang up our weaving. We talk and weave. It’s how we enjoy ourselves with our friends. And also, when we go to fetch water, we call all the girls in the village, shouting to each other, and off we go in a line, chattering, to fetch water. We fetch the water in earthenware pots carried on our head, so on the way back we walk slowly and sometimes put the jars down and sit for a bit. When there’s no water nearby, we have to walk a long way to fetch it. That is another way of enjoying ourselves, talking to our neighbours and friends. That’s how we make friends. Whatever job the women have to do, they always call their neighbours. Especially the girls. We don’t like mixing with the older women so much. While we have great respect for older women, we prefer to talk to friends of our own age. We’re taught, for example, not to mix with girls of twenty-two if we’re only twelve, because they are adults and won’t understand what we’re talking about. So we always go around with those of our own age, our own size. Another time to get together is when we want leaves from the plants which grow in the mountains to make our tamales. We call all the girls, one afternoon, to go and cut leaves up in the mountains. I used to like climbing to the tops of trees, but only when my mother wasn’t looking. Mothers think it’s scandalous for girls to climb trees. They scold us very badly if they see us. We used to climb trees, shouting and singing, calling to each other; happy. These amusements are enough for us. When there are fiestas, even a village fiesta, girls mustn’t leave their mother’s side. Even in our own village we have to stay with our mother, so that people will respect girls who are growing up. Our parents say that a girl who goes off on her own learns bad things and becomes a girl who hangs about the streets. She must stay with her parents. So in the fiestas, although we say hello to the others and so on, we always stay by our mother’s side.

  The boys are given much more freedom on the whole. It may not be out of machismo, but more because nothing that happens to a girl, when she gets involved with a man, happens to them. So boys are a bit freer, but they still respect their parents’ rules. If their father says: ‘I want you home at such and such a time’, then they’re home at that time. They can go off on their own to play with their friends, but when they get older, when they’re fourteen or fifteen, they have more work and haven’t the time to wander off. Going for a walk for us means going to get firewood or do another job. The boys call to each other too and go together to collect firewood, or clear some undergrowth, or some other job. They get together and off they go. Boys and girls have fun in almost the same ways. Mind you, our parents don’t allow us to mix with groups of boys, be they our neighbours or cousins, uncles or whatever. We have to go with the girls, not the boys, because the boys are often very crude. They don’t like girls going with them either. In this sense, there’s a big division between us. We do sometimes chat about the boys or the boys about the girls.

  At home I used to talk to my father a lot because I was his favourite daughter. My brothers and sisters were there too, but I don’t know–my father was just very fond of me. And I loved him very, very much. Sometimes he’d let me speak to our community, so that they would be as fond of me as they were of him. It wasn’t that I was more important because I was a catechist, it was more because of the part I played in the community. Parents are always concerned about your participation in the community, but not at an adult’s level since adults get together to talk about more serious things. The thing is that Indians have secrets and it’s not always a good thing for children to know them. Or not so much that it’s not a good thing but because it’s not necessary…We respect these different levels in the community. If we need to, we find out about adult matters. If they don’t need to, children know how to respect adults’ talk. For example, if a neighbour comes to talk to my father or mother and they say: ‘Go and fetch some firewood,’ that means that they don’t want me to listen. In our case, however, my father wanted us to be a part of the community, and wanted us to take community matters and our involvement in the life of our people seriously. That’s how I began teaching the doctrine.

  A lot of people (in fact almost everyone in my village) are Catholics, devout Catholics. We have rosaries, novenas,* we celebrate God’s word, the lot. I learned the rosary by heart and my neighbours used to ask me to go and pray for a little two-year-old boy on his birthday and things like that. So I began working as a catechist, as a Catholic missionary, in the community. And I wasn’t the only one. M
y brothers and sisters and our neighbours’ children did as well because we all have a small part to play in the community. That’s when we started organizing ourselves and taking a collection every time we met. One centavo, two centavos, and soon we’d collected a large sum of money in our collecting box and we bought things for the community. And we set up a little shop selling salt, and other things the community can use. It’s a village enterprise, helped by the priest. The priests always tell us that we must unite, that we must band together. And we are now united. What I did in this sense was to start my day’s work an hour earlier than I’d been used to doing before. So if I usually started work at six a.m., I’d be up and setting off for work at four a.m. ready to start work at five a.m. because we always walk to work and this takes us an hour or an hour and a half. I used to leave work at five p.m. but I began leaving an hour earlier and getting home at five, ready to pray with the neighbours. We have a very nice atmosphere in our village, and we can call our neighbours to come and pray. The Lord doesn’t ask us all to say our rosaries alone at home but to have a regular meeting. We have our meeting for the cultural matters of our people on a Friday. Our Catholic meeting was on Mondays. On Mondays those who want to say the rosary ask for it in our Monday meeting of catechists. Those who want a different ceremony from the Catholic one ask for it on Fridays. This way things don’t get mixed up. I got really interested in learning to play the instruments of our ancestors. The tún, the tambor, the sijolaj which we still use, and the chirimía. My brothers and sisters and I started practising. We used to pray as Catholics with our neighbours while we played our instruments. We knew some Catholic hymns. The first songs our parents were taught, they taught them to us and we sing them most of the time, but we have a lot of problems playing new songs because we have to memorize them.

  So we decided Monday was the Catholic day. Monday is reserved. We have to be at the meeting at four p.m. We do everything the Bible asks us. When someone is ill we resort to our Indian methods but, at the same time, we believe Catholic Action is a form of expression. If anyone asks us to say a rosary for the sick person, the neighbours come and we pray in this way. First, we say a prayer to open the ceremony. Then, since we know the litanies and the mysteries, we say them and the Creed. We use the Creed a lot. In the middle of the Creed, there is usually a place for the sick person, and then we finish the prayer. We usually pray for an hour and a half, or two hours with the sick person. When we’ve finished, everyone hopes that the invalid will get better. Everyone offers support to the family with the sick person so they’ll carry on and not despair. We sing the Catholic Action hymns. And we practise the doctrine. We report to parents about their children’s progress and we talk about everything to do with the Catholic religion. For example: the priest is coming on such and such a day, what we are going to prepare for him, where we are going to receive him and so on. We talk about things that concern all of us. Sometimes there are a lot of things to discuss because the priests also send us questionnaires which we have to answer and fill in altogether as a community. So we meet and discuss all the things the catechists need to talk about and even when there’s not a lot to discuss, we don’t waste our time because there are always village matters to talk about. For instance, someone might need a house because his son is setting up his own home. We discuss what we can do to help him, who is going to go and help him, whose turn it is. There’s always some collective action to arrange, either on a Monday or a Friday. Then there’s another meeting which is the meeting of the community’s important men and women. This usually has to do with our land. Especially when they started taking our land away. Every Thursday the village meets to decide: Who is going to the capital? Who would accompany my father, the community’s elected leader? How would he get there? All this means we have to put aside time to attend to all the community’s affairs. We must have time for our ceremonies, our Indian festivities. We must have time for the Catholic religion. This is another means of expression and complicates our situation. But the whole village is ready to give the time. No-one disagrees, because most of our people are not atheists. We don’t live like the ladinos.

  XIII

  DEATH OF HER FRIEND BY POISONING

  ‘I’d always see my mother cry…I was afraid of life and asked myself, what will it be like when I’m grown up?’

  —Rigoberta Menchú

  My community always loved me very much, right from when I was very little. They’d tell me all their sorrows and their joys, because my family had been there for a very long time. We never let the slightest opportunity pass–any little fiesta–to organize some sort of celebration using our customs. It was our way of fulfilling our obligation to the community.

  I remember going down to the finca when I was just beginning my fourteenth year. We’d all go down as a group now, whereas before everyone used to go off to different fincas and we wouldn’t see each other until we got back to the Altiplano. On that occasion, we went down with our neighbours and their children–all happy together. We arrived at the finca and a friend and I were sent picking cotton. She was a catechist too and we were always together because we were great friends. One day she died of poisoning when they were spraying the cotton. We all buried her in the finca and we decided not to work for two days. It wasn’t a strike really, it was more out of respect for our grief. Her name was Maria. She was my friend. A group of about ten of us had come down to the finca.

  There were boys, men and women among the catechists. There was a group of women who began organising themselves along Christian principles. My mother was the president of the group. Then there was a group of young people around my little brother, the one who was killed (the young people were all together, boys and girls). I had a group of children because I loved children. I had a lot of patience. There was also a men’s group. We used to organise many things in the community, but there wasn’t any proper formal organization as such. The women used to go mostly to learn the Gospel, to sing a bit and chat and then go home, and it was the same for the children, I’d teach them doctrine, a few other things and play for a while. Sometimes we arranged to study texts with my brothers who could read. We’d read a text and analyze the role of a Christian. This brought us together more and made us more concerned about each other’s problems.

  My friend was a very important person for the community. She was much loved. From then on, I was very depressed about life because I thought, what would life be like when I grew up? I thought about my childhood and all the time that had passed. I’d often seen my mother crying, although many times she’d hide because she’d never let us see when she was grieving. But I’d often find her crying at home or at work. I was afraid of life and I’d ask myself: ‘What will it be like when I’m older?’ And that friend of mine had left me with many things to think about. She used to say that she would never get married because marriage meant children and if she had a child she couldn’t bear to see him die of starvation or pain or illness. This made me think a lot, I drove myself mad thinking about it. I remember thinking that I couldn’t go on. One day I’d be a grown-up woman, and the older I got the more responsibilities I had. I was afraid. I decided I wasn’t going to get married either. And when my friend died, I said: ‘I’ll never get married’, because that’s what she’d said. I didn’t want to go through all the grief. My ideas changed completely; so many ideas came to me. ‘What am I going to do?’ I often thought I’d stay and work in the Altiplano. Even if I went hungry, I wouldn’t go down and work in the finca. I hated it because my friend died there and two of my brothers died there. My mother told me that one of my brothers died of intoxication as well and I saw another of them die of hunger, of starvation. I remembered my mother’s life; I saw her sweat and work but she never complained. She carried on working. She often had nothing. One month she said we hadn’t got a single centavo: ‘What were we to do?’ This made me very angry and I asked myself what else could we do in life? I couldn’t see any way of avoiding living as everyone el
se did, and suffering like they did. I was very anxious.