I, Rigoberta Menchú: Identity, Oppression, and Resistance

Introduction

I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala is the story of a young girl coming of age in her homeland, and the story of her people — the indigenous Indians of Guatemala. It is not a tender story; it is filled with violence and oppression. Rigoberta's narrative is one of a determined people who will fight for what they believe in. Yet the reader is compelled to ask: is their way of life worth fighting and dying for?

Rigoberta Menchú is a Quiché Indian woman from Guatemala who tells her own life story in this remarkable book. A Paris anthropologist recorded her in a series of interviews and transcribed them into this tale of growing up in a vastly different country from our own.

Life on the Plantation: Poverty and Exploitation

Menchú was born in 1959, and by the time she was eight she was working with her family in the finca, picking coffee and cotton on the coast of Guatemala for the rich planters, or ladinos. When they were not picking, the family made the long journey back to their small village in the mountains, where they had their own plot of land to grow crops for sale. The family was desperately poor and uneducated; their only means of survival was to work incredibly hard under extremely harsh conditions.

For example, the workers in the fields all shared one outdoor open toilet for about 400 people, and the landowners sprayed pesticides on the fields even while workers were picking. Rigoberta watched one of her older brothers die from the spray, and others have been documented as dying because of it. The landowners also routinely changed quotas and found many ways to cheat the workers out of their meager wages. Rigoberta also witnessed another of her brothers die of malnutrition, and as she worked on the plantations she saw that other Indians were suffering the same hardships.

Her experiences made her angry, and she began to look for ways to escape this life of poverty and oppression. She worked as a maid in Guatemala City, but found the household as difficult as the fields, and she returned to her family.

Her father was also angry at the hardships they faced and began to work with others to save their small plot of land from large landowners who wanted it for themselves. Rigoberta remembers:

Land, Resistance, and Family Loss

"My father fought for twenty-two years, waging a heroic struggle against the landowners who wanted to take our land and our neighbors' land. After many years of hard work, when our small bit of land began yielding harvests and our people had a large area under cultivation, the big landowners appeared: the Brols. It's said there that they were even more renowned criminals than the Martínez and García families, who owned a finca there before the Brols arrived" (Menchú 103).

Committed to holding on to what they had worked so hard for, the peasants resisted the landowners whenever they could and began discussing the formation of a union that would unite them and give them more rights and opportunities. "My father came back very proudly and said, 'We must fight the rich because they have become rich with our land, our crops.' That was when my father started to join up with other peasants and discussed the creation of the CUC with them" (Menchú 115).

The Guatemalan government became involved and began its own campaign to seize the peasants' lands. Eventually, Rigoberta's father was jailed for resisting government land seizures, and the family managed to secure his release only through a combination of extraordinary effort and luck. The landowners and government combined to "repress" Rigoberta's village, which meant the Indians would be pushed off the land after two years. All their hard work to create viable cropland would be in vain, and they would have to begin anew.

Rigoberta came to understand that language and education were the keys to success for the Indians, and she vowed to learn Spanish so she could be more valuable to her family and protect them from the greedy landowners. Eventually, another of her brothers and both of her parents were murdered by government troops. "I told myself that I wasn't the only orphan in Guatemala. There are many others, and it's not my grief alone, it's the grief of a whole people, and all of us orphans who've been left must bear it" (Menchú 236). Rigoberta joined a guerrilla group fighting the government and eventually had to flee to Mexico to avoid execution herself.