‘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 else did, and suffering like they did. I was very anxious.
They didn’t give us the sack that time because they saw that we were right. Well, the thing was that we got an overseer who was less criminal than the others. He tried not to throw us out for the two days we missed and he didn’t dock our wages for it at the end of the month. I was mad with grief then. I said: ‘Why don’t we burn all this so that people can’t come and work here any more?’ I hated the people who sprayed the crops. I felt they were responsible. ‘Why did they spray poison when people were working there?’ I was very upset when I went back home that time. I was with my neighbours and my older sister because my father had stayed up in the Altiplano. When I got home I told my mother that my friend had died. My mother cried and I said: ‘Mother, I don’t want to live. Why didn’t die when I was little? How can we go on living?’ My mother scolded me and told me not to be silly. But to me it wasn’t silly. They were very serious ideas. After that, I got to know some priests. I remember that I couldn’t speak Spanish so I couldn’t talk to them. But I saw them as good people. I had a lot of ideas but I knew I couldn’t express them all. I wanted to read or speak or write Spanish. I told my father this, that I wanted to learn to read. Perhaps things were different if you could read. My father said, ‘Who will teach you? You have to find out by yourself, because I can’t help you. I know of no schools and I have no money for them anyway.’ I told him that if he talked to the priests, perhaps they’d give me a scholarship. But my father said he didn’t agree with my idea because I was trying to leave the community, to go far away, and find what was best for me. He said: ‘You’ll forget about our common heritage. If you leave, it will be for good. If you leave our community, I will not support you.’ My father was very suspicious of schools and all that sort of thing. He gave as an example the fact that many of my cousins had learned to read and write but they hadn’t been of use to the community. They try to move away and feel different when they can read and write. My father explained all this to me, but I said: ‘No, I want to learn, I want to learn,’ and I went on and on about it.
After that we went down to the finca for the last time. It was to a different one this time. One of the landowners asked my father to let me go and work as a maid for him. My father refused. ‘That’s a bad life. They will treat you badly, in ways which we never have. I couldn’t bear my daughter to suffer somewhere far from us. It’s better to suffer together.’ So, there I was with this problem of how to find a way out of this life when this landowner offered me twenty quetzals a month to be his maid. But I said no, better not to. My elder sister had the same problem. Well, she said: ‘I’m going.’ She made up her mind. My father told her she’d be going to her ruin, that who knows where they’d take her. He was very worried because he’d never wanted us to go to the capital to be maids. He thought that our ideas would be all distorted afterwards. He was afraid that we would forget all the things he and my mother had taught us since we were little.
My sister left, but I stayed on with my parents. I used to wonder how my sister was getting on. At the end of the month my father went to see her and when he came back he told me: ‘Your sister is all right. But she’s suffering because the work isn’t like our work and because rich people treat you like dirt.’ I said it didn’t matter if they treated her badly, if she could learn Spanish and learn to read. That was my ambition. But my sister couldn’t stand it and came home. ‘I wouldn’t wait on a rich man again for anything in the world,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve learned that rich people are bad.’ But I wondered how it could be harder than our work, because I always thought that it would be impossible to work harder than we did. So why put up with it? And that’s when I went to be a maid in the capital. I wasn’t yet thirteen, still very young.