—Rigoberta Menchú
I worked from when I was very small, but I didn’t earn anything. I was really helping my mother because she always had to carry a baby, my little brother, on her back as she picked coffee. It made me very sad to see my mother’s face covered in sweat as she tried to finish her workload, and I wanted to help her. But my work wasn’t paid, it just contributed to my mother’s work. I either picked coffee with her or looked after my little brother, so she could work faster. My brother was two at the time. Indian women prefer to breastfeed their babies rather than give them food because, when the child eats and the mother eats, that’s duplicating the food needed. So my brother was still feeding at the breast and my mother had to spend time feeding him and everything.
I remember that, at that time, my mother’s work was making food for forty workers. She ground maize, made tortillas, put the nixtamal on the fire and cooked beans for the workers’ food. That’s a difficult job in the finca. All the dough made in the morning has to be finished the same morning because it goes bad. My mother had to make the number of tortillas the workers would eat. She was very appreciated by the workers because the food she gave them was fresh. The food we ate was cooked by another woman who sometimes gave us things that had gone bad, or tortillas that were tough and beans which jumped when you tried to pick them up. In the finca the women who do the cooking don’t know which people they will cook for. The overseer comes and says: ‘This is your group…this is what you give them to eat, these are the people you feed, you feed them at such and such a time…so get to work.’ So different women fed us. My mother liked to give the workers the food they deserved, even if it meant she didn’t sleep all night. They came back tired from the fields and she wanted to see that they ate well, even though her own family were eating badly somewhere else.
I was five when she was doing this work and I looked after my little brother. I wasn’t earning yet. I used to watch my mother, who often had the food ready at three o’clock in the morning for the workers who started work early, and at eleven she had the food for the midday meal ready. At seven in the evening she had to run around again making food for her group. In between times, she worked picking coffee to supplement what she earned. 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. It was that time, I remember, that when we went back to the Altiplano after five months in the finca, I was ill and it looked as if I’d die. I was six and my mother was distressed because I nearly died. The change of climate was too abrupt for me. After that, though, I made a big effort not to get ill again and, although my head ached a lot, I didn’t say so.
When I turned eight, I started to earn money on the finca. I set myself the task of picking thirty-five pounds of coffee a day. In those days, I was paid twenty centavos for that amount. If I picked the thirty-five pounds, I earned twenty centavos a day, but if I didn’t, I had to go on earning those same twenty centavos the next day. So I set myself this task and I remember that my brothers and sisters finished work at about seven or eight in the evening and sometimes offered to help me, but I said; ‘No, I have to learn because if I don’t learn myself, who’s going to teach me?’ I had to finish my workload myself. Sometimes I picked barely twenty-eight pounds because I got tired, especially when it was very hot. It gave me a headache. I’d fall asleep under a coffee bush, when suddenly I’d hear my brothers and sisters coming to look for me.
In the mornings we’d take turns to go off into the scrub and do our business. There are no toilets in the finca. There was only this place up in the hills where everybody went. There were about four hundred of us living there and everyone went to this same place. It was the toilet for all those people. We had to take it in turns. When one lot of people came back, another lot would go. There were lots of flies on all that filth up there. There was only one tap in the shed where we lived, not even enough for us to wash our hands. A little way away, there were water holes which the landowners used for irrigating the coffee or any other crops. So we had to go over to those water holes to get a drink and fill the water bottles we took with us to the fields.
Coffee is picked from the branch, but sometimes when it was ripe and fell off the branch, we’d have to collect it up off the ground. It’s more difficult to pick up than pick from the branch. Sometimes we have to move the bushes to get at the coffee. We have to pick the nearest beans very carefully–bean by bean–because if we break a branch we have to pay for it out of our wages. It’s worse when the coffee bushes are young. The branches are more valuable than on the old bushes. That’s the job of the overseer, watching how the workers pick the coffee and seeing if they damage the leaves. We had to work very carefully. We learned that very early in our lives. I remember that it’s one of the things that taught me to treat things very gently. Picking coffee is like caring for a wounded person. I worked more and more as I set myself bigger quotas. For instance, I made myself collect up off the ground a pound over what I picked every day. So I kept working harder but they didn’t pay me more, they didn’t pay me the extra work I did. They paid me very little.
I went on working and, as I said, for two years they paid me only twenty centavos. I picked more and more coffee. It increased by one pound, two pounds, three pounds. I worked like an adult. Then, finally, they started paying me more. By the time I was picking seventy pounds of coffee, they payed me thirty-five centavos. When I began earning, I felt as if I were an adult, as if I was making a direct contribution to our subsistence, together with my parents; because when I got my first pay, the little I got was added to what my parents earned. So I now felt I was part of the life my parents lived. It was very hard on me. I remember very well never wasting a single moment, mainly out of love for my parents and so that they could save a little of their money, although they couldn’t really save any because they had to tighten their belts so much anyway.
It was during this period, when I was eight, that I fell ill. I’d been in the finca barely three months when I became ill and we had to go back home. It was in March, the time when we had to go back to the Altiplano anyway to sow our maize. So we went back and that’s when I began working with my parents in the fields as well. It was another life, life in the fields–we were much happier. Although things were hard there too, because it rains a lot in the mountains and we were always wet. Our house was very draughty, we were never out of the wind, and the animals came into the house whenever they wanted. It meant we were never comfortable, and we were never warm because we didn’t have clothes.
We went down to the finca again. It was round about May. My father went to cut cane on another plantation, one of my brothers went to pick cotton, and the rest of us stayed on the coffee plantation. When my father worked nearby he used to come back and stay, but when we worked on another finca we wouldn’t see him until the end of the month. It was like that most of the time, with my father cutting, sowing or cleaning cane somewhere else. My father usually worked in sugar and the rest of us in coffee. So we were in different fincas. Sometimes we saw each other every month and sometimes every three months.
When my parents came back from work, they were very tired. My father, for instance, used to get very, very tired and he often didn’t feel like talking or telling us anything. My mother didn’t either. They were never cross but very often we had to keep quiet and do everything right so that mother and father could rest for a while. Even more so with the noise of all those people living together, thousands of people we don’t know all living together. Among them are people who’ve gone through a great deal, a lot of upheavals in their lives. Prostitutes and people like that. So it’s a very difficult atmosphere to live in and children are often not looked after very well. Mothers are very tired and just can’t do it. This is where you see the situation of women in Guatemala very clearly. Most of the women who work picking cotton and coffee, or sometimes cane, have nine or ten children with them. Of these, three or four will be more or less healthy, and can survive,