Many of them are ladinos from Oriente.* But there are also many of our people from the Altiplano among them. My father used to call them ‘ladinized Indians’. When we say ‘ladinized’ we mean they act like ladinos, bad ladinos, because afterwards we realized that not all ladinos are bad. A bad ladino is one who knows how to talk and steal from the people. He is a small-scale picture of the landowner.
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. The drivers were sometimes drunk, boozed. They stopped a lot on the way but they didn’t let us get out. This enraged us; we hated the drivers because they wouldn’t let us get out although they used to drink on the way. 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.
When we worked down on the cotton plantation (I think I was about twelve) I was already big and did the work of a grown woman. I remember the first time I saw a finca landowner, I was frightened of him because he was very fat. I’d never seen a ladino like that. He was very fat, well dressed and even had a watch. We didn’t know about watches then. I didn’t have any shoes although many of our people wore caitos; but nothing which compared to the shoes this landowner had. At dawn the overseer told us: ‘Listen, you’re going to work one more day at the end of the month.’ Whenever anything like this happened, they’d just announce they were adding another day on to the month. If the month had thirty-one days, we had to work the first day of the next month, or if there were rest days for any reason, we’d have to make up the day. So the overseer told us: ‘The owner is coming today to thank you for your work and wants to spend some time talking to you, so nobody leave because we have to wait for him.’ So we stayed in our camp, in the workers’ barracks where we lived and they divided us into groups. Then, when the great landowner arrived, we saw he was accompanied by about fifteen soldiers. This seemed really stupid to me, because I thought they were pointing their rifles at the landowner, so I asked my mother: ‘Why are they forcing the landowner to come and see us?’ But it was really to protect him. There were about fifteen soldiers and they found a suitable place for the owner to sit. The overseer said: ‘Some of you have to dance for the owner.’ My mother said no, and hid us. They wanted the children to prepare a sort of welcome for the owner. But none of us dared even go near him because he had so many bodyguards with guns. When the owner began to speak, he spoke in Spanish. My mother understood a little Spanish and afterwards she told us he was talking about the elections. But we didn’t even understand what our parents told us–that the ladinos had a government. That is, the President who had been in power all this time, was, for my parents, for all of us, President of the ladinos’ government. It wasn’t the government of our country. That’s what we always thought. So my mother said that he was talking about the government of the ladinos. What was it he was saying? The landowner was speaking, and the overseer started translating what he was saying. They told us he said we all had to go and make a mark on a piece of paper. That would be a vote, I imagine that it was a vote. We all went to make our mark on the paper. They gave my father one and my mother and showed them the place to put their mark. I remember that the paper had some squares with three or four drawings on it. So my parents and my older brothers and sisters marked the paper in the place the owner told them. He warned us that anyone who didn’t mark the paper would be thrown out of work at the end of the month. Anyone who was thrown out would not be paid. The workers were forced to mark the paper. So that was another day of rest, and it meant we would have to work the second day of the next month as well. The landowner left, but afterwards…I dreamed about him over and over again…it must have been the fear, the impression made on me by that man’s face. I remember telling mother: ‘I dreamed about that old ladino who came here.’ And mother said: ‘Don’t be silly, he’s only a man, don’t be afraid.’ That’s what she said. But all the children there ran away from their parents and cried when they saw that ladino, and even more at the soldiers and their weapons. They thought they were going to kill their parents. I thought so, too. I thought they were going to kill everybody, because they were carrying guns.
We didn’t even know what the name on the paper was. My father sometimes used to tell us names because of the things he remembered. In the defeat of 1954, he said they captured men from our region, and from other regions. They took our men off to the barracks. My father was one of those caught. He has very black memories of those days. He says many, many of our people died and we only escaped because of our own quick wits. That’s how we survived, my father said. His memories of this period are very bad. He always talked about the President there was then, but we didn’t know any of the others. We didn’t know the rest, not their names or what they were like. We knew nothing about them. Then the landowner came to congratulate us. We saw him a second time. He came with his wife and one of his sons. They were nearly as fat as he was. They came to the finca and told us that our President had won, the one we had voted for. We didn’t even know that they were votes they’d taken away. My parents laughed when they heard them say ‘our President’, because for us he was the President of the ladinos, not ours at all. This was my impression as a small girl and I thought a lot about what the President would be like. I thought he was an even bigger man than the landowner. The landowner was very big and tall, and we didn’t have big men like that in our village. So I thought that the President was even taller than the landowner. When I was older, I met the landowner again and he asked my parents for me. That was when I was sent to the capital. That’s another stage in my life.
V
FIRST VISIT TO GUATEMALA CITY
‘When I went to the city for the first time, I saw it as a monster, something alien, different.’
—Rigoberta Menchú
I felt grown-up for the first time when at the age of seven I got lost in the mountains. That was the time when we came back from the finca to the Altiplano and my brothers and sisters and I all fell ill. We’d got back from the finca in an awful state. When our money ran out, my father said if we went back down to the finca with sick children, he’d be left alone to bury his children there. So he said: ‘The only thing to do is to go up into the mountains and collect mimbre.’ My elder brothers and sisters, my father and myself. In fact, we children often went up to collect mimbre when we had some spare time because it grows near where we live. My father also went whenever he had a moment, or a week without other work. So we all went to cut mimbre. In a week, between the lot of us, we collected a quintal (a hundredweight) of mimbre. Then it was dried. We pulled it along with ropes and collected it together. Some of us stripped the bark off and some rolled it up. We’d gone further up into the mountains that time and up there if you’re not careful you can get lost. We had a dog with us as a guide. He used to look out for animals and knew the way. That dog used to guide us everywhere in the mountains. Anyway, the blessed dog saw we didn’t have any food; we’d finished the food because we’d been in the mountains for over eight days. The poor dog was hungry, so one night he went back home. He’d gone before we realized it. We’d no idea where we were. It was the rainy season: June or July, if I remember right. So there were lots of black clouds and we couldn’t get our bearings. My father was very worried because if we stayed in the mountains, we could be attacked by wild animals. How were we going to find the path? So we started walking and walking, on and on. We didn’t know if we were going further into the mountains or out of them. We couldn’t hear the noise of animals from any of the villages. We couldn’t hear any dogs barking. Usually when dogs bark in any village, the sound carries a long way in the mountains. But there was nothing. And then, the others were so busy looking for the path, they forgot about me and I was left behind. I didn’t know which way to go and my father was almost in