We went down to the finca again. Christmas is the last month we spend in the finca. In January we start working our land in the Altiplano. January and February are the months we sow our crops. In March we go back down to the coast to earn money to spend on the maize fields, and when the first work on the maize is over, we return to the finca to carry on earning for food.
When I was ten, they raised my pay because by then I was picking forty pounds of coffee. For picking cotton I still got very little because it was a lot in quantity but not in weight. There’s an office in every finca where all the work you deliver is taken. It’s weighed and noted down for their accounts. Towards the end, my brothers (who are not stupid) managed to figure out the ways in which they fiddled the amounts weighed. They have tricks to make it weigh less, when the real amount is much more. That happens everywhere. It’s a special trick of the men in charge of weighing the workers’ loads; that’s when they steal many pounds of coffee. They put large amounts on one side so that they can deliver more and get paid more. It’s part of a long process which starts the moment the agents contract the workers in their villages and load them into the lorries like animals. It’s one long process of robbing them of their pay. They’re charged for absolutely everything, even for the loading of the lorry. Then, in the finca, the overseers steal from the workers from the very first day. The cantina steals from them too. It continues until the last day. It’s so bad that we have had the bad experience of getting home again without a centavo. Coffee is measured by the workload set but cotton is measured by a different method. If you pick sixty-five pounds of cotton per day, you’re paid according to the weight. But with coffee, you have to pick a quintal per day and if you don’t it’s added on and the next day you have to finish that quintal before starting another one. In my case, when I started work I had to do a third of what an adult’s task would be. That was thirty-five pounds. But some days I could only do twenty-eight pounds so the next day I had to carry on with the same one. This way you fall further and further behind until you have to spend two days just making up the amount you’re missing. With cotton, the situation is different but it’s very difficult too. The worst work is when it’s second ‘hand’. First ‘hand’ is when the flowers are nicely grouped together, but second hand is when you have to pick between the branches the cotton which has been left behind the first time. That’s much harder work but the pay is the same.
VIII
LIFE IN THE ALTIPLANO. RIGOBERTA’S TENTH BIRTHDAY
‘We Indians never do anything which goes against the laws of our ancestors.’
—Rigoberta Menchú
Back in the Altiplano, we all set to work with our hoes. I remember from the age of nine going off to the fields with my hoe to help my father. I was like a boy, chopping wood with an axe, or with a machete. There was very little water near our village. We had to walk about four kilometres to fetch our water, and that added to our work a lot. But we were happy because that was the time of year we sowed our bit of maize and it was sometimes enough for us to live on. At times, we managed to scrape a living in the Altiplano and didn’t go down to the fincas. When the fields were full of plants and we had a bit of maize and a few tortillas, we were very happy up there. The land was fertile and I remember my mother giving us different types of beans like ayote, chilacayote and others that grew up there. But we didn’t eat a lot of beans because most of what my mother grew was taken to market to buy soap, or some chile. That’s what we ate–chile. And if we wanted to, we could pick plants in the fields. So, with chile, plants and tortillas, we ate very well. That was our menu most of the time.
It’s not the custom among our people to use a mill to grind the maize to make dough. We use a grinding stone; that is, an ancient stone passed down from our ancestors. We don’t use ovens either. We only use wood fires to cook our tortillas. First we get up at three in the morning and start grinding and washing the nixtamal, turning it into dough by using the grinding stone. We all have different chores in the morning. Some of us wash the nixtamal, others make the fire to heat water for the coffee or whatever. In our house there were a lot of us–my elder sister, my mother, myself, and my sister-in-law, my elder brother’s wife. So there were four women working in the house. Each of us had her job to do and we all had to get up at a certain time, our time was three in the morning. The men get up at that time too because they have to sharpen their hoes, machetes and axes before going off to work. So they get up at the same time. There are no lights in our village so at night we see by the light of ocotes. An ocote is a piece cut from a pine tree. It lights up immediately as if petrol had been poured on it. It burns easily. You can light it with matches and it flames up. That’s what we use for light to move about the house. It burns slowly and if you put a bunch of ocote somewhere, it lights everything up.
Whoever gets up first, lights the fire. She makes the fire, gets the wood hot and prepares everything for making tortillas. She heats the water. The one who gets up next washes the nixtamal outside, and the third one up washes the grinding stone, gets the water ready and prepares everything needed for grinding the maize. In our house, I made the food for the dogs. My father had a lot of dogs because of the animals which came down from the mountain. These dogs guarded our animals. It was my job to make food for them. Their food was the hard core of the maize, the cob. We had a little place just outside the house, a sort of little hollow, where we’d throw the cob when we’d taken the grains of corn off. With time, the cobs rot and go soft, and are cooked with lime. Then it’s all ground up for the dogs’ food. Lime makes our dogs strong, otherwise they’d all die. They don’t eat our food, which is maize, but sometimes, when there’s no maize, we eat the dogs’ food.* We make it into tortillas, just as we do with the maize dough. Anyway, it was my job to make the dogs’ food. I’d get up, wash the stone and things I needed and start grinding the dogs’ food. I started doing this when I was seven. When the fire is made and the nixtamal washed, everyone starts grinding. One person grinds the maize, another grinds it a second time with a stone to make it finer, and another makes it into little balls for the tortilla. When that’s all ready, we all start making tortillas. We have a flat earthenware pan big enough to hold all the tortillas. Then the men–my brothers and my father–all come and get their tortillas from the pan and start eating. In the mornings, we sometimes drink coffee or sometimes only water. We usually make pinol; that is, maize toasted and ground. This is drunk instead of coffee because coffee is too expensive for my parents to buy. Sometimes my parents haven’t enough money for panela either; we don’t use sugar but panela which comes straight from the sugar cane. When there’s no panela in the house, we can’t drink pinol or coffee. So we drink water. In the mornings, we usually have a big plate of chile, and all of us have a good meal of tortilla and chile before going off to work. Our dogs are used to being with people, they enjoy the natural world as well and like going off to work with the men. So we have to feed the dogs before the workers leave, as the dogs always go with them. If the men are going to work a long way off, we have to make tortillas for them to take with them, but if they’re working nearby, one of the women stays at home and makes the midday meal for them.
Our men usually leave around five or half past every morning. They go and tend the maize or cultivate the ground. Some of the women go with them because we sow the beans and, when the plant starts sprouting, we stick in little branches for it to wind itself around, so that it doesn’t damage the maize. So, yes, at times we’re working alongside the men all day. What we used to do, was that my sister-in-law stayed at home because she had a baby. She stayed at home, looked after the animals, made the food and brought it to us at midday. She’d bring atol, tortillas, and if she saw anything she could use in the fields, she’d prepare that too and bring it along for us to eat. Atol is the maize dough. We use it for a drink, as refreshment. It’s dissolved in water, boiled, and it thickens, according to how you want to drink it. Of course, sometimes we take it in turns to stay home because my sister-in-law grew up on the fincas and in the Altiplano too, so she gets bored in the house because the food only takes a minute to make and the rest of the time she has to herself. She uses the time to do a lot