‘My mother said: “I don’t want to make you stop feeling a woman, but your participation in the struggle must be equal to that of your brothers.”’
—Rigoberta Menchú
Indian women are not coquettish. They don’t have time for new hairstyles, and arranging their hair, and all those things. But ladino women do. Even if they’ve nothing to eat, they’d rather put pins in their hair, and have a waistline, and at all costs wear shoes. There are many differences between us. I remember my mother telling me: ‘My child, you don’t need to paint your face because make-up abuses the wonders God has given us. Don’t you learn these things.’ But there came a time when I began to move away from my mother and this worried her very much. It isn’t that I didn’t love my mother, but I felt slightly more love for my father. It’s probably because of all his work, because of all the threats made against him. I never thought my mother would meet a worse death than my father. I always thought it would be worse for my father than for my mother.
But when I was ten I was closer to my mother. That’s the age she told me about the facts of life. She taught me by talking about the experiences of her grandmother: she told me about when her grandmother was pregnant. She didn’t pass on her own experiences, not that she hadn’t had them, but because she felt more comfortable teaching me through the experiences of others. Well, my mother told me that an Indian woman is only respected if she’s wearing her full costume. If she forgets her shawl, the community starts losing respect for her and a woman needs their respect. ‘Never forget to wear your apron, my child,’ my mother used to say.
Our tenth year actually marks the stage when we enter womanhood. It’s when parents buy their daughters everything they need: two aprons; two cortes; two perrajes; so that when one is being washed she can wear the other. Whenever we go out to do an errand, we must wear our complete costume. My mother told me not to cut my hair: ‘If you cut your hair, people notice and say that that woman is breaking with many of our things, and they won’t respect you as they ought to.’ My mother often used to scold us when we’d run off without our aprons: ‘You must dress as you’re always going to dress. You mustn’t change the way you dress, because you’re the same person and you’re not going to change from now on.’ My mother also explained what maize meant for us. She said that a pregnant woman mustn’t carry maize which has been cut in her apron because the cuttings are what give the maize life. It’s the womb of the maize which nourishes us. But you can’t liken it to a child either. The child will eat maize when he grows up. The child deserves as much respect as the maize cuttings. You can’t compare the two, then. They mustn’t be mixed. That was the significance my mother saw in it. Our aprons are also something very important: women use them all the time, in the market, in the street, in all her work. It’s something sacred for a woman and she must always have it with her.
Later my mother explained many other little things. For instance, about birds, about medicines. She’d say: ‘Don’t ever eat this or that plant, or take it as medicine,’ and she’d explain why not. A pregnant woman can’t take just any kind of medicine, or any old concoctions from trees either. She went on to explain that I’d have to have periods. I asked her a lot of questions out loud while we’d cut plants at the foot of the mountains but, as I said, she usually told me about my grandparents, not about herself. But when I had stomach ache, I didn’t tell my mother, I’d usually look for my father because of that very trust I had in him. And there were many little things I could have asked my mother, but I asked my father. My mother told me that she’d been rather abandoned when she was a little girl. No-one looked after her so she’d had to learn everything alone. She said: ‘When I got my period, I didn’t even know what it was.’ Mamá used to get very angry. She taught us to do all our jobs well, and if we didn’t do them right, she’d punish us. She said: ‘If it’s not put right now, who’ll teach you later on? This is for your own good, not mine.’ I remember beginning to make tortillas when I was three. I could wash the nixtamal. She taught me to wash it and to make it. When I was older she explained that there were certain things you mustn’t walk over–a plate or a cup, for instance–and not to walk over the maize since maize is our food. Well, just details we had to learn!
I also remember going to sow our crops in the fields. Mamá explained the days which were fertile for sowing. She always dreamed about nature. I think it was just her own imagination working. But when someone believes, things that you imagine often happen. I’ve proved this many times with medicines. I’d say: ‘This is sure to make me better,’ and logically I’d get better even though it’s not the medicine that had the effect. I think that my mother was like that. She said that when she was little she used to climb on tree trunks and up trees and look after animals and things like that. She used to talk to animals a lot. When she hit an animal, for instance, she’d say: ‘I hit you for this reason, so don’t be angry.’ And this way she gets on good terms with it again. And she also told me that, once, when she was little, she’d found a little pig in the mountains and she knew it didn’t belong to anyone because we had no neighbours then, we were the only families living there. There were other families a few kilometres away from where we were. She picked the pig up and carried it home. By my grandfather was a very honest man and was capable of beating any of his children if they stole anything, even a fruit or something small. Among Indians, it’s forbidden to steal from a neighbour’s house. Nobody can abuse his neighbour’s work. So my mother took the little pig home but she didn’t know how to explain to my grandfather because he’d probably throw her and her pig out of the house. So she hid it in the temascal and left it there. My grandfather had two cows and the cows gave milk, and they made cheese to take to market to sell to rich people. Well, my mamá took part of the milk and gave it to the little pig so that he’d grow without my grandfather seeing. But after fifteen days–it’s incredible that the little pig was alive–it had grown and got bigger and bigger even though it didn’t have a mamá. And my grandfather noticed that my mother had a little pig.
He almost killed her. He said: ‘Go and take that pig away. I don’t want stolen pigs in my house.’ There was a terrible row. But afterwards the little pig was allowed to grow up, although my grandfather told my mother that she had to find food for it herself. Well, my mother made sacrifices, and the pig was soon big, about five or six months old. My mama was very worried and discussed it with the pig. She said: ‘My papá doesn’t love you, but I do.’ Then, one night some coyotes came in and took the pig away. There were about three or four coyotes. And the pig started screaming and my mamá went running out. She was resolute and went into the mountains running after them to try and catch the pig, but when they got further into the mountains, my mother felt a breeze and said: ‘Ah, it’s obvious that the pig belongs to the world, not to me.’ So she left the animal and went back. But she used to dream about her little pig all the time. She’d see it in the coyote’s mouth as they were taking it away.
It was about that time that she said she was going to learn from a chimán. That’s what we call a man who tells the Indians’ fortunes. He’s like a doctor for the Indians, or like a priest. My mother said: ‘I’m going to be a chimán and I’ll learn with one of these men.’ And she went to the chimán and he taught her many things out of his imagination connected with animals, with plants, with water, with the sun. My mamá learned a great deal, but who knows, perhaps that wasn’t to be her role in life. Nevertheless, it helped her a lot to learn and dedicate herself to other things. My mother loved the natural world very much. In Guatemala the sky is nearly always blue, so when clouds begin to gather on the sides of the mountains, it means it is going to rain. My mother could tell the days it was going to rain; what kind of rain was going to fall; if it was going to be heavy or not. When a whole line of clouds passed in a certain direction, my mother would say: ‘Hurry up, children, because it’s going to rain.’ And it was true. It rained exactly as if she’d planned it herself. She enjoyed life very much, in spite of the sad life we had and even though she suffered very much when we were ill. I remember that sometimes I couldn’t walk because the soles of my feet split. When it rained, it was the mud which split them and it went septic between my toes. One thing I remember is that my mother knew a lot about natural country medicine and whatever illness we had, she’d go looking for leaves of plants and cured us immediately.
Another of the special things about my mother was that she loved giving little presents. Even if we didn’t have very much, she said that any person who comes to a house must always be given something, even if it’s only a little pinol or at mealtimes a tortilla with salt or whatever there is. ‘You must always know how to give,’ my mamá would say, ‘because a person who gives will also receive when the time comes. When you’re in a difficult situation, you won’t have to face your troubles alone. You’ll always receive help, even if it isn’t from the same person you gave to. There will always be people who will hold you in high esteem.’ She always made us have some hot water on the fire so there would always be something for anyone who came to the house, even if it was only a little atol.
She also taught us to look after and preserve our household things. Our cooking pots, for example. She had a lot of earthenware pots that she’d had for many years and they hadn’t broken or been ruined because she knew how to look after her things. Well, she told us that if you are poor, you can’t buy things all the time, nor must you only expect things from your husband. You yourself have to do your part to keep your little things too. And she gave us examples of people whom she knew or that she’d helped to improve themselves: ‘That’s what happens with women who don’t look after their pots and then when they don’t have them any more, they have to go and buy more.’ She was like that with everything. Another of our customs she taught us was that you mustn’t mix women’s clothes with men’s clothes. She told us to put our brothers’ clothes on one side when we wash them. First you wash the men’s clothes and then, at the end, our own. In our culture we often treat the man as something different–the woman is valued too, of course–and if we do things we must do them well. First, because they are our men, and second, because it’s a way of encouraging them, in the same way our ancestors did for their men. Not mixing the clothes was, I think, the order they respected. My mother said that we women have certain things that a man doesn’t have, like our period for instance. So we keep all our clothes separate. It’s the same for everything: we don’t mix them, but most of all with our clothes. However, with kitchen utensils and all the things for the house, there isn’t one for each.
There’s something else I used to see my mother do. My father would often come home from work tired, and my mother liked to give him the largest portion of the food and keep a little for herself. And I used to ask her: ‘Why did papá have to eat a lot?’ My mother would say that my father used a lot of energy in his work and that if we didn’t look after him, he could become ill and get weaker. She gave him food to encourage him. That’s how she was with everything. One of the important things, my mother used to say, is that it depends on the woman how little money is spent. In the country we buy things for a whole week and it’s up to the woman how she manages her household expenses. She’s the one who keeps the money. If it’s the woman’s turn to go to market, she buys the things, but if it’s not, she has to show the man what they need so that he can buy it. My mother hardly ever went to market. My father used to go and he’d buy all the things my mother told him to, even if it were only a pot, or a broom. The other thing was that since my mother was a midwife for a long time and knew most of the medicinal plants, or any remedies for adults or children, she’d often be called out at three or four in the morning to go and see someone who was ill. She was hardly ever at home. She, therefore, had to give us a lot of advice and from when we were very little she taught us how to look after the house, and how to care for our things so that they didn’t get ruined. My mother was very happy because I have a sister who copies my mother in every way. She learned all the small things, all of them, from my mother and acted like her in the house. She’s married, but I don’t know where she is now.
My mother didn’t have to show us our food, because we had to go and look for food for ourselves. We had to look for new things to eat because it’s tedious always eating the same sort of plants. And more so at harvest time, when there’s only one woman at home while the others are all working in the harvest. So, the one who stays at home has to find food for the midday meal. My mother liked always being busy. She could make mats, weave cloth, plait straw for hats, make earthenware pots and comales. She knew how to do all these things. Sometimes, on a Sunday for instance, when she wasn’t doing the washing (we all did it when we were older), my mother would make some things for the house. She’d have time to make one or two comales, or some cooking pots. Or people used to ask her to make things for them. During our last days in the village, she had a cow which she loved very much, really very much. When we were older, and when my sisters-in-law were there, my mother didn’t have to do so many of the chores in the house, so she’d get up in the morning and go straight away to see the animals, or take them to places where they’d be for the whole day. And when the men went off to work, she’d go to work in the fields as well. People thought a lot of her because she was the woman who was all over the place, even though we sometimes didn’t like my mother going off so much because we missed her at home. There were times when she didn’t come home for two or three days because she had to look after people who were ill. We used to get annoyed, my brothers especially. We wanted our mother to be at home. Later on, she started going to other villages and became a militant. She’d go and visit the sick but at the same time she worked in the organization. She organized the women.
There was something my mother used to say concerning machismo. You have to remember that my mother couldn’t read or write and didn’t know any theories either. What she said was that men weren’t to blame for machismo, and women weren’t to blame for machismo, but that it was part of the whole society. To fight machismo, you shouldn’t attack men and you shouldn’t attack women, because that is either the man being machista, or it’s the woman. Because very often we go to two extremes whereby the woman says she is free and becomes radicalized in that sense. And instead of solving the problem, it just makes it bigger. My mother said: ‘We women have a very important role to play in this sense, because we are better at expressing affection.’ And she’d point to my father as an example. When they were young, my father always liked to be served. He was also very jealous. But my mother told us that they began to discuss these things because they had to learn to be adults. When she got married, it was difficult for them to understand that they had to start a new life, and that married life would not be like before. Well, anyway, I can’t say because I’m not married; but my mother used to say that where there’s a couple, there will always be problems. However good the marriage is, there will be problems. But it will be up to the two of them to solve those problems, and to solve them they must make a life for the two of them, an adult life. Perhaps that’s what my mother was referring to when she talked about the problem of jealousy my father had. It was only when they started discussing that they both understood the problem and solved it. Because no matter how aware the woman is or how aware the man is, if they don’t discuss things they can’t understand. She said: ‘The thing is that nobody, not even other women, are going to solve the problem if you yourself don’t think about how you’re going to do it.’ It’s the same with men.
Another example my mother gave us was that, when my father was really angry, my mother never answered him back. Then afterwards, when they were getting on well and were in their senses, that was when they’d discuss it. That’s how the defects of both of them were sorted out and how they managed to have a happy family. Of course there were problems and they did argue sometimes, but that didn’t mean that it was a bad marriage, no, it meant they understood each other and got on together. And it was mainly because of that that my mother had so much freedom to do her work and go out, because among Indians, it’s often very difficult for a woman to go out alone. In fact, as I was saying before, when we were young girls, we were only allowed out with our mother or one of our brothers. And it’s still like that today. A married woman is not free to go out, to go alone or visit her neighbours. Perhaps it’s because her husband is jealous, since we always have to take into account our life in a community, and behave so society does not disapprove of us. It’s the image we have to give to everyone. That’s how this way of life emerges, often dependent on others. But my mother had absolute freedom to go out because she represented our community. We’d managed to have a relatively communal life in my village. Sometimes the women went to market or went together to town to buy some things. I remember that whenever we went down to the town, a whole troupe of women would go, all from our village, and we always had plenty to discuss with our neighbours. And sometimes men, women and children would all go down the path together. We’d split up to buy our things and then all go back again.
My mother also had a lot of patience with her children, and her daughters-in-law. There were lots of problems because we grew up in a very big household. There were my grandparents, all our children and my sister-in-law and her three children who lived with us. This meant a lot of work, looking after the house, the food and the dishes. Well, most of us went off to work and my sister-in-law stayed at home or sometimes she went with us to work. It was nice when we all went off to work. We liked it best of all when we were picking the beans and bringing in the maize harvest. Sometimes the beans are picked before the maize and sometimes afterwards. My brothers and sisters and I always got on well together. But the time came for some of them to get married and my mother had to cope with big problems because, first, her son’s wives weren’t used to the kind of work we did, and second, because they didn’t want to live on their own since they came from big families as well and they’d feel bad being in a house alone with their husbands. So they stayed with us. It is an obligation that every community has; to let the wife live with her husband’s parents. We began having problems because my sister was very bad-tempered and she didn’t like things being left half finished–she liked things done and done quickly. My sister was hardly ever still. She was always working, always busy, and, of course, it was difficult for my sisters-in-law to adapt to this sort of work. We were forced to find somewhere separate for my sisters-in-law because there was no way they could go on living in our house. So my mamá faced a lot of problems because she had to share her affection between her children and her daughters-in-law as well. We felt very hard done by. There was a bit of jealousy on our part when my other brothers got their houses and my mother would go over there and still look after them as if they were little boys. We began to be jealous and scolded my mother when she got home. We quarrelled with my brothers because of my sisters-in-law. But my mother shared herself with all of us and said that if she loved one she had to love all. Or she’d have to reject all of us!
My mother couldn’t express her views about political things; but she was very politicized through her work and thought that we should learn to be women, but women who were useful to the community. And so from when we were very small, we had to go with her to learn from her example and copy all the little things she taught us about politics. She was the first to decide to join the struggle, before I did, because I didn’t really know anything, or what anything meant. My mother was a woman who already had a political vision and was already working in organizations before I knew anything. She didn’t belong to any specific organization. She received information from the CUC, but when she got to know the compañeros in the mountains, the guerrillas, she loved them like her sons too. She’d known them first in other areas because my mother used to travel a lot tending the sick, and she was often called to assist pregnant women in other areas. That’s how she got to know them. When she worked with the CUC, she represented the CUC, but she didn’t belong to any specific organization. She said what was important was doing something for our people. She said it would be sad to die without doing anything, without grasping reality in your hands. When she talked to me, before I had any specific work for the CUC (because at the beginning I only helped them with any work they wanted done, I wasn’t an organizer), she said: ‘My child, we must organize. It’s not something I demand of you because I’m your mother. It’s your duty to put into practice what you know. The days of paternalism, of saying “poor girl, she doesn’t know anything,” are over.’ My mother made no distinction between the men’s struggle and the women’s struggle. She said: ‘I don’t want to make you stop feeling a woman, but your participation in the struggle must be equal to that of your brothers. But you mustn’t join as just another number, you must carry out important tasks, analyze your position as a woman and demand a share. A child is only given food when he demands it. A child who makes no noise gets nothing to eat.’ And that is why I felt that I had to participate more actively.
My mother was also very courageous. On Sundays, she’d leave for the town at three in the morning with only her horse for company. As I said, my mother was brave but, nonetheless, I learned more from my father. I regret this very much now because my mother knew many things that I don’t know, things like medicines and what she knew about nature. I know this as well, of course, but only on a general level, not at all profoundly.
My mother had the same idea of women as our women had had in the past. They were very strict and believed a woman should learn her womanly occupation so that she could live and face many things. And she was right. Because we can see a difference. My father was very tender and always protected me, but it was my mother who coped with the big problems in our family. She was capable of seeing her son even as he was dying and doing everything she could to save him. But my father, for instance, he’d see my little brother ill or nearly dying and he’d escape from it. For him it was better to get drunk and forget everything, while my mother didn’t allow herself the luxury of getting drunk when she had to do something to save my little brother whose life was in danger. There were many estimable things in my father; many things which he could face but also many things he couldn’t face. And my mother too. She could face many things, but there were other things she couldn’t do. So I love them both the same. I love them both but I have to say that I grew up more at my father’s side. My mother taught many people many things, but I didn’t learn as much from her as I should have learned.