Finca Term Analysis

I remember going along in the lorry and wanting to set it on fire so that we would be allowed to rest. What bothered me most was travelling on and on and on, wanting to urinate and not being able to because the lorry wouldn’t stop. […] It made me very angry and I used to ask my mother: ‘Why do we go to the finca?”. And my mother used to say: ‘Because we have to. When you’re older you’ll understand why we need to come.’ I did understand, but the thing was I was fed up with it all. When I was older, I didn’t find it strange any more. Slowly I began to see what we had to do and why things were like that. I realised we weren’t alone in our sorrow and suffering, but that a lot of people, in many different regions, shared it with us.

Watching her made me feel useless and weak because I couldn’t do anything to help her except look after my brother. That’s when my consciousness was born. It’s true. My mother didn’t like the idea of me working, of earning my own money, but I did. I wanted to work, more than anything to help her, both economically and physically. The thing was that my mother was very brave and stood up to everything well, but there were times when one of my brothers or sisters was ill—if it wasn’t one of them it was another—and everything she earned went on medicine for them. This made me very sad as well.

I said: ‘Why don’t we burn all this so that people can’t come and work here any more?’ I hated the people who sprayed the crops. I felt they were responsible. ‘Why did they spray poison when people were working there?’ I was very upset when I went back home that time. I was with my neighbours and my older sister because my father had stayed up in the Altiplano. When I got home I told my mother that my friend had died. My mother cried and I said: ‘Mother, I don’t want to live. Why didn’t die when I was little? How can we go on living?’ My mother scolded me and told me not to be silly. But to me it wasn’t silly. They were very serious ideas.

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.