I, Rigoberta Menchu by Rigoberta Menchu

Author:Rigoberta Menchu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 1983-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

XVII

SELF-DEFENCE IN THE VILLAGE

‘…They began to fulfil the destiny which was concealed in the marrow of their bones…’

—Popol Vuh

My time working as a maid, my long stay in the finca without going home, and my parents’ problems, made me very confused. Yes, I was very confused. I went through a sort of painful change within myself. It wasn’t so difficult for the rest of them at home to understand what was real and what was false. But I found it very hard. What did exploitation mean to me? I began to see why conditions are so different. Why do they reject us? Why is the Indian not accepted? Why was it that the land used to belong to us? Used our ancestors to live here? Why don’t outsiders accept Indian ways? This is where discrimination lies! Catholic Action too submitted us to tremendous oppression. It kept our people dormant while others took advantage of our passivity. I finally began to see all this clearly. And that’s when I started working as an organizer. No-one taught me how to organize because, having been a catechist, I already knew. We began forming groups of women who wanted to join the struggle. And I saw that teaching the children how to act when the enemy came was part of the struggle too. The moment I learned to identify our enemies was very important for me. For me now the landowner was a big enemy, an evil one. The soldier too was a criminal enemy. And so were all the rich. We began using the term ‘enemies’, because we didn’t have the notion of enemy in our culture, until those people arrived to exploit us, oppress us and discriminate against us. In our community we are all equal. We all have to help one another and share the little we have between us. There is no superior and inferior. But we realized that in Guatemala there was something superior and something inferior and that we were the inferior. The ladinos behave like a superior race. Apparently there was a time when the ladinos used to think we weren’t people at all, but a sort of animal. All this became clear to me.

I threw myself into my work and I told myself we had to defeat the enemy. We began to organize. Our organization had no name. We began by each of us trying to remember the tricks our ancestors used. They say they used to set traps in their houses, in the path of the conquistadores, the Spaniards. Our ancestors were good fighters, they were real men. It’s not true what white people say, that our ancestors didn’t defend themselves. They used ambushes. Our grandparents used to tell us about it, especially my grandfather when he saw that we were beginning to talk about defending ourselves against the landowners, and wondering if we had to rid ourselves of the landowners before we’d be left in peace. We said: ‘If they threaten us, why don’t we threaten the landowner?’ My grandfather gave us a lot of support.

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