In I, Rigoberta Menchú, 23-year-old Rigoberta Menchú Tum relates her life experience as a member of the Maya-Quiché Indigenous community in Guatemala. For decades, landowners and complicit government institutions have sought to keep members of Rigoberta’s community and, more broadly, poor Guatemalan peasants, from owning land. As Rigoberta gives an account of her childhood as well as her adulthood as a political activist, her narrative reveals a shift in her approach to suffering and injustice: from anger, confusion, and helplessness, the young woman soon resorts to active resistance and rebellion. In the face of severe oppression, both Rigoberta and her community reject their culture’s traditional principles of nonviolence for the sake of survival: instead of surrendering, they choose to fight the oppressive landowners and government that seek to destroy the community. Although endurance and resilience are key aspects of the Maya-Quiché mentality, Rigoberta’s experiences suggest that passive acceptance of injustice isn’t a sustainable strategy. Rather, resilience should be integrated into an active political struggle to defend people’s rights.
During Rigoberta’s childhood, her Maya-Quiché community defends suffering and unhappiness as a way of life: instead of striving for change, they believe that people should accept their fate with endurance and dignity. For example, as part of various Indigenous ceremonies, Indian children are taught that oppression is an ordinary aspect of life, and that they should resign themselves to a certain degree of unhappiness. On Rigoberta’s 10th birthday (which symbolically marks her transition into adulthood), her parents tell her that poverty will keep her from realizing the personal goals she might have for herself, but that she should endure this fate with strength and resilience. Although Rigoberta respects her parents’ beliefs, their embrace of suffering does not bring her peace. On the contrary, witnessing a variety of traumatic events—the death of her young brother Nicolás due to malnutrition, the grief and strenuous work that her mother endures without complaining, and the degrading treatment of Indian workers on the fincas—brings her much pain and anger. She develops a deep hatred of the finca system and the mixed-race ladinos who exploit poor Indians for personal gain. At a loss about what to do with these emotions, Rigoberta considers extreme options such as taking her own life or leaving the community to work as a maid in the capital. Without a solution to so much injustice, these emotions confuse her.
After these early years of anger, Rigoberta undergoes a shift in perspective: she realizes that she can fight against exploitation and discrimination, instead of simply accepting it as a necessary aspect of life. While working as a maid for a rich ladino family in Guatemala City, Rigoberta notices her coworker Candelaria’s resistance to some of their mistress’s commands. This behavior inspires her to reflect on her own life choices. Although Rigoberta’s upbringing has taught her to work hard and obey orders, she realizes that she is not willing to accept her mistress’s contempt and discrimination. In the end, she chooses to quit her job, a decision that signals her newfound willingness to stand up for herself.
This change in Rigoberta’s attitude foreshadows a change in her entire community’s mentality. It is precisely during this period that her father Vicente Menchú, who has been defending his village’s right to own land against landowners’ appropriations, is sent to prison because of his activism. Through conversations with other prisoners, Vicente discovers that the problems his community faces are common to many other poor Guatemalans. This leads him to take part in the creation of the CUC, a group meant to defend peasants throughout the country. The new ideas he brings, throughout his time as an elected village representative and as a political activist, help the community understand that the oppression they suffer is the product of an unjust system of exploitation. And by bonding together, the villagers realize that they might be able to actively combat their suffering. As a result, the community realizes that the same endurance they have used to tolerate suffering can be put at the service of a different goal: resisting their oppressors. The villagers’ sense of self-sacrifice proves beneficial in their approach to resistance and social justice, as everyone—men, women, and children—agrees to take part in the fight for survival. Although the villagers know this involves risking their lives, they are used to so much suffering that they accept the risk of putting their health and well-being in danger, for the good of the community.
Experiences of brutal suffering thus motivate Rigoberta and her people to dedicate themselves to the political cause. For example, although the violent murder of Rigoberta’s brother Petrocinio has the potential to make her family members give up on their political resistance, it actually has the opposite effect: it encourages them to work even harder to secure Indigenous rights, so that no one else will have to endure such a traumatic event. Suffering, then, takes on new meaning: it remains a source of grief and anguish, but it also motivates everyone to move the political struggle forward. Endurance no longer breeds passive acceptance, but rather a steadfast commitment to resistance against cruel oppression. This shift from acceptance to resistance highlights the inner strength of courageous individuals who have endured so much suffering that they turn it into a source of motivation to defend the poor against oppression.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Tolerance vs. Resistance ThemeTracker
Tolerance vs. Resistance 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.
They told me I would have many ambitions but I wouldn’t have the opportunity to realize them. They said my life wouldn’t change, it would go on the same—work, poverty, suffering. At the same time, my parents thanked me for the contribution I’d made through my work, for having earned for all of us. Then they told me a bit about being a woman; that I would soon have my period and that was when a woman could start having children. They said that would happen one day, and for that they asked me to become closer to my mother so I could ask her everything.
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.’
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.
My mother used to say that through her life, through her living testimony, she tried to tell women that they too had to participate, so that when the repression comes and with it a lot of suffering, it’s not only the men who suffer. Women must join the struggle in their own way. My mother’s words told them that any evolution, any change, in which women had not participated, would not be a change, and there would be no victory.
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.
But in this respect I’ve met serious problems when handing out tasks to those compañeros, and I’ve often found it upsetting having to assume this role. But I really believed that I could contribute, and that they should respect me. […] It doesn’t mean you dominate a man, and you mustn’t get any sense of satisfaction out of it. It’s simply a question of principle. I have my job to do just like any other compañero. I found all this very difficult and, as I was saying, I came up against revolutionary compañeros, compañeros who had many ideas about making a revolution, but who had trouble accepting that a woman could participate in the struggle, not only in superficial things but in fundamental things. I’ve also had to punish many compañeros who try to prevent their women taking part in the struggle or carrying out any task.
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.
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.
