Much of Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s life story is concerned with identifying the roots of inequality and discrimination in Guatemalan society, where a minority of rich, mixed-race ladinos exploits the poor, Indigenous majority. Over time, Rigoberta, her family, and her community—all members of the impoverished Maya-Quiché population—realize that the political system sets them up to fail. Eager to expand its wealth and power, the upper class—which brings together landowners, the government, and the army—maintains an unequal system of economic exploitation and racial discrimination. In this system, the poor are even divided among themselves: many poor ladinos hold the racist belief that they’re superior to Indians, instead of understanding that they are both members of an exploited class. This unequal system often erupts in the upper class inflicting violence on vulnerable populations, who cannot easily defend themselves against kidnappings and murders. However, the cause for such cruelty lies not in a few evil leaders. Rather, Rigoberta argues that the country’s entire political and economic system is harmful: landowners, the government, and the military all seek to dominate poor Indians, in order to keep a rich ladino minority in power. Understanding this and uniting the lower classes, she suggests, is the only way to get to the root of the problem and change Guatemala for the better.
The oppression that Rigoberta’s community faces—a combination of economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and physical violence—is meant to leave the poor helpless, incapable of defending themselves either physically or legally. Government institutions, landowners, and finca overseers find myriad ways to rob poor workers of their hard-earned salaries and of their land. This includes inventing debts, lying about a worker’s productivity, and tricking the Indians into signing documents they cannot read. Beyond economic exploitation, the community is also subjected to brutal acts of violence, against which it has no legal recourse. Rigoberta recalls one particularly violent episode, when the bodyguard of Carlos García (one of the landowner’s sons) murdered her friend Petrona Chona for refusing to become Carlos’s mistress. Although the bodyguard is briefly sent to prison, this punishment is insufficient: it merely seeks to placate the angry Indian peasants. In light of this injustice, Rigoberta realizes that no one in the legal system is interested in listening to poor Indians’ version of the facts: the authorities are always going to side with the rich and powerful. These anecdotal acts of violence become large-scale when they turn into a state-sponsored campaign to suppress resistance in Indian villages. Under the guise of eliminating communism and suppressing guerrilla activity, the Guatemalan army massacres entire villages, leaving mass graves behind as a proof of their inhumane deeds. One of the most cruel and painful episodes that Rigoberta recounts is the vicious murder of her brother Petrocinio, tortured and burned alive along with other prisoners accused of belonging to guerrilla groups. The sheer horror of this scene, along with many other instances of savage violence by the army and the police, emphasizes the cruelty that Rigoberta’s people are subjected to.
However, despite witnessing uncountable acts of cruelty, Rigoberta gradually realizes that the roots of such violence lie not in a few individuals but in the very structure of governance, in which a rich ladino majority dominates a poor Indian majority. This system of domination, which relies on racial and economic inequality, seeks to manipulate everyone into siding with the authorities. For example, despite often coming from the same villages as the Indian peasants, the overseers on the fincas treat the workers cruelly. In this way, their desire for economic gain and social advancement turns them into traitors to their own community. Similarly, after speaking with captured soldiers, Rigoberta and her community realize that soldiers are often forced to take part in deeds that they disapprove of. Fear, lack of education, and the threat of violence within the military itself keeps soldiers from rebelling, because they know they will be killed as a consequence. Thus, instead of defending the interests of their Indian communities, these individuals are forced to take part in a violent system of oppression. Racial discrimination also plays an important role in sustaining the economic hierarchy and dividing the poor. Although Rigoberta initially believes that all ladinos are evil, her interactions with ladino activists in the CUC convince her that this is not necessarily the case. She discovers that poor ladinos, too, are exploited by the system, although they might still have racist opinions against Indians. This realization convinces Rigoberta that the only solution is overcoming ethnic, racial, and linguistic divides to unite the poor. Only through unity will the poor succeed in fighting against exploitation.
Therefore, in order to fight against inequality, members of all classes and ethnicities need to realize that the current system of government is deeply unjust. The burning of the Spanish Embassy in January 1980, in which both CUC activists and embassy officials are killed by armed forces, helps raise Guatemalan people’s awareness of the violent measures that the government uses to quell social protest. This event leads to a wave of support across all social classes for the fight of poor workers and peasants. It demonstrates to many Guatemalans that peaceful democratic action lies on the side of the people, not the government. In this light, Rigoberta and her fellow activists believe that promoting education across economic and ethnic divides is the only way the entire country can come to terms with issues of injustice and inequality. Only through dialogue and political awareness will members of previously divided groups realize that they can fight together against injustice—not in order to promote their own social or economic interests, but to support universal human rights. Rigoberta’s identification of the entire political and economic system as a singular oppressive force suggests that fostering unity across racial and economic divides is the only way of achieving justice and equality for all.
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Class, Race, and Inequality Quotes in I, Rigoberta Menchú
My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty-three years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone. I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people. It’s hard for me to remember everything that’s happened to me in my life since there have been many very bad times but, yes, moments of joy as well. The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: my story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
We began thinking, with the help of other friends, other compañeros, that our enemies were not only the landowners who lived near us, and above all not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger, poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership of land. The best land was not in our hands. It belonged to the big landowners. Every time they see that we have new land, they try to throw us off it or steal it from us in other ways.
I must say one thing, and it’s not to denigrate them, because the priests have done a lot for us. It’s not to undervalue the good things they have taught us; but they also taught us to accept many things, to be passive, to be a dormant people. Their religion told us it was a sin to kill while we were being killed. They told us that God is up there and that God had a kingdom for the poor. This confused me because I’d been a catechist since I was a child and had had a lot of ideas put in my head. It prevents us from seeing the real truth of how our people live.
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.
I know that no-one can take my Christian faith away from me. Not the government, not fear, not weapons. And this is what I have to teach my people: that together we can build the people’s Church, a true Church. Not just a hierarchy, or a building, but a real change inside people. I chose this as my contribution to the people’s war. I am convinced that the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society.
That is my cause. As I’ve already said, it wasn’t born out of something good, it was born out of wretchedness and bitterness. It has been radicalized by the poverty in which my people live. It has been radicalized by the malnutrition which I, as an Indian, have seen and experienced. And by the exploitation and discrimination that I’ve felt in the flesh. […] Of course, I’d need a lot of time to tell you all about my people, because it’s not easy to understand just like that. And I think I’ve given some idea of that in my account. Nevertheless, I’m still keeping my Indian identity a secret. I’m still keeping secret what I think no-one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets.
