Ladino Term Analysis

Our people have taken Catholicism as just another channel of expression, not our one and only belief. Our people do the same with other religions. The priests, monks and nuns haven’t gained the people’s confidence because so many of their things contradict our own customs. For instance, they say: ‘You have too much trust in your elected leaders.’ But the village elects them because they trust them, don’t they? The priests say: ‘The trouble is you follow those sorcerers,’ and speak badly of them. But for our people this is like speaking ill of their own fathers, and they lose faith in the priests.

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.

We slept in the same clothes we worked in. That’s why society rejects us. Me, I felt this rejection very personally, deep inside me. They say we Indians are dirty, but it’s our circumstances which force us to be like that. For example, if we have time, we go to the river every week, every Sunday, and wash our clothes. These clothes have to last us all week because we haven’t any other time for washing and we haven’t any soap either. That’s how it is. We sleep in our clothes, we get up next day, we tidy ourselves up a bit and off to work, just like that.

Our people don’t differentiate between people who are homosexual and people who aren’t; that only happens when we go out of our community. We don’t have the rejection of homosexuality the ladinos do; they really cannot stand it. What’s good about our way of life is that everything is considered part of nature. So an animal which didn’t turn out right is part of nature, so is a harvest that didn’t give a good yield. We say you shouldn’t ask for more than you can receive.

Now, she can’t leave her husband because she’s signed a paper. The Church’s laws and the ladinos’ laws are the same in this—you cannot separate. But the Indian feels responsible for every member of his community, and it’s hard for him to accept that, if a woman is suffering, the community can do nothing for her because the law says she cannot leave her husband.

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.

I was thinking of our humble way of life and their debauched life. I said, ‘How pathetic these people are who can’t even shit alone. We poor enjoy ourselves more than they do.’

In the schools they often celebrate the day of Tecún Umán. Tecún Umán is the Quiché hero who is said to have fought the Spanish and then been killed by them. Well, there is a fiesta each year in the schools. They commemorate the day of Tecún Umán as the national hero of the Quichés. But we don’t celebrate it, primarily because our parents say that this hero is not dead. […] His birthday is commemorated as something which represented the struggle of those times. But for us the struggle still goes on today, and our suffering more than ever. We don’t want it said that all that happened in the past, but that it exists today, and so our parents don’t let us celebrate it. We know this is our reality even though the ladinos tell it as if it were history.

Well, the compañeras had to go to a cheap hotel after the presentation. This is what hurts Indians most. It means that, yes, they think our costumes are beautiful because it brings in money, but it’s as if the person wearing it doesn’t exist. Then they charge the people who go to the festival a lot for their tickets and get a lot of money from the presentation of the queens. Everyone has to pay to go in. Only people with money can go.

A leader must be someone who’s had practical experience. It’s not so much that the hungrier you’ve been, the purer your ideas must be, but you can only have a real consciousness if you’ve really lived this life. I can say that in my organization most of the leaders are Indians. There are also some ladinos and some women in the leadership. But we have to erase the barriers which exist between ethnic groups, between Indians and ladinos, between men and women, between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, and between all the linguistic areas.