Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in I, Rigoberta Menchú, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Tolerance vs. Resistance
Class, Race, and Inequality
Ancestors, Tradition, and Community
Gender and Sexuality
Language, Education, and Power
Spirituality, Nature, and the Sacredness of Life
Summary
Analysis
Two of Rigoberta’s brothers died on the finca. The eldest, Felipe, died after a plane sprayed the coffee with pesticides, causing him to die of intoxication. The youngest, Nicolás, died of malnutrition at the age of two. Since Rigoberta’s mother couldn’t spend all her time taking care of Nicolás (otherwise she would lose her job), the family found themselves helpless while the young boy was in agony.
Rigoberta’s brothers’ deaths reveal the helplessness that poor workers experience when faced with illness, since they have neither the time nor the money to care for their sick ones. Felipe’s illustrates the physical dangers of working on fincas, as well as the utter lack of care that finca owners have for their workers’ safety and health.
Themes
After Nicolás died, Rigoberta’s mother didn’t know how to bury her child. Because the 400-500 workers that slept together in one house all came from different communities, they didn’t share the same language and couldn’t communicate. The workdays, which begin at three in the morning, did not allow for people to get to know one another. The caporal told Rigoberta’s mother that she could pay a tax to bury the child on the finca.
This episode serves as an early illustration of the difficulties that language barriers create, even within the same group of exploited, Indigenous workers in Guatemala. Rigoberta will later realize that overcoming these linguistic differences and banding together as a unified group is crucial to fighting against oppression.
Themes
Moved by Rigoberta’s family’s plight, one of the workers brought them a small box. The family then spent the morning burying and mourning Nicolás. As a result, the overseer told Rigoberta’s mother to leave without getting paid, because of the work they missed. Without the transportation organized by the finca, the family realized that they were completely lost. Out of solidarity, some neighbors lent Rigoberta’s mother money, and they succeeded in making it back to their home, although no one in the family as paid for their work. They were denied their salary for buying medicine, even though this was a lie: lack of medicine was precisely the reason Nicolás died. Once Rigoberta’s father and the rest of the family returned home, they learned of Nicolás’s death and used their earnings to pay the neighbor back.
This episode reveals that the finca system does not only seek to exploit workers, making them work excessively hard—it also literally robs them of their salary. Even though Rigoberta and her family know that the overseer is lying, and that they do not own any money to the finca for buying medicine, their vulnerable position does not allow them to protest: they find themselves forced to bow to the finca’s cruel and arbitrary laws, which has benefited from their work but refuses to pay them for it. Meanwhile, small acts of generosity toward Rigoberta’s family show the solidarity that can exist among the poor, as others sacrifice what little they have for those who need it most.
Themes
After living through this, Rigoberta was furious and terrified of the adult life that awaited her, knowing that she too was bound to watch her children die. That hatred for the finca, she recalls, has stayed with her until the present. Rigoberta describes the tricks that members of the finca use to pay workers less, for example by tinkering with the amount of coffee weighed. She characterizes this as a system meant to rob Indians of well-earned salaries, because they are charged for everything, including their journey on the lorry. These cruel tricks, which workers cannot defend themselves against, led Rigoberta’s family to return home with absolutely no money after weeks of work.
Rigoberta associates adult life with motherhood—which, in her community, is itself associated with grief and suffering, given the high rates of child mortality in poor Indigenous groups. Moments such as these nurture her doubts about whether or not she truly wants to get married and become a mother. Although she feels isolated in these fears, she later realizes that a very large number of Indian women share exactly the same doubts: this is a structural problem, not a matter of individual will. In this sense, Rigoberta begins to understand that women face specific problems related to economic inequality, and that these problems are just as much a product of injustice as overwork on the fincas.
Themes
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