For Rigoberta’s Maya-Quiché community, the maize cereal plant (and its associated food products, such as tortillas and tamales) represent their culture’s reverence for all living things. Maize lies at the center of the community’s ethical and spiritual beliefs. By harvesting and preparing maize for consumption, the plant serves a symbolic role: it encourages all members of the community to respect the earth, sun, and water that went into growing the maize, and to honor the resources that nature provides for them. The manual harvest and preparation of maize-based foods—processes that eschew technology or machinery, as all traditional activities in Rigoberta’s village do—are what bind Rigoberta’s community together. These activities represent their union as a community bound by ancestral traditions, but also their peaceful coexistence with everything else in the natural world. In this sense, these maize-based foods represent the care and respect that defines Rigoberta’s Indigenous community, in contrast with modern society’s tendency to exploit natural resources.
For Rigoberta’s community, tortillas and tamales are sacred foods and thus play a crucial role in sacred events such as marriage ceremonies. This is a stark contrast to the way Guatemalans outside of their insular community treat food. For instance, at Christmas, the mistress who employs Rigoberta as a maid hands her a tamal in an offhanded manner. Rigoberta interprets this action as a demonstration of contempt rather than respect, since the gesture lacks the generosity and care that her Indigenous community associates with sharing food. In this way, the hardened tortillas that poor workers are given when working at fincas or in rich households symbolize the exploitation and discrimination that Indians face in Guatemalan society, a stark contrast to the their culture’s emphasis on gratitude and respect.
Maize, Tortillas, and Tamales Quotes in I, Rigoberta Menchú
When a male child is born, there are special celebrations, not because he’s male but because of all the hard work and responsibility he’ll have as a man. It’s not that machismo doesn’t exist among our people, but it doesn’t present a problem for the community because it’s so much part of our way of life. […] At the same time, he is head of the household, not in the bad sense of the word, but because he is responsible for so many things. This doesn’t mean girls aren’t valued. Their work is hard too and there are other things that are due to them as mothers. Girls are valued because they are part of the earth, which gives us maize, beans, plants and everything we live on.
When I saw the maid bring out the dog’s food – bits of meat, rice, things that the family ate—and they gave me a few beans and hard tortillas, that hurt me very much. The dog had a good meal and I didn’t deserve as good a meal as the dog. Anyway, I ate it, I was used to it. I didn’t mind not having the dog’s food because at home I only ate tortillas with chile or with salt or water. But I felt rejected. I was lower than the animals in the house.
They turned us out of our houses, and out of the village. The Garcías’ henchmen set to work with ferocity. They were Indians too, soldiers of the finca. First they went into the houses without permission and got all the people out. Then they went in and threw out all our things. I remember that my mother had her silver necklaces, precious keepsakes from my grandmother, but we never saw them again after that. They stole them all. They threw out our cooking utensils, our earthenware cooking pots. We don’t use those sort of…special utensils, we have our own earthenware pots. They hurled them into the air, and, oh God! they hit the ground and broke into pieces. All our plates, cups, pots. They threw them out and they all broke.
Maize, Tortillas, and Tamales Symbol Timeline in I, Rigoberta Menchú
