We grew up on those fincas too. They are on the south coast, part of Escuintla, Suchitepequez, Retalhuleu, Santa Rosa, Jutiapa, where coffee, cotton, cardamom and sugar are grown. Cutting cane was usually men’s work and the pay was a little higher. But at certain times of the year, both men and women were needed to cut cane. At the beginning things were very hard. They had only wild plants to eat, there wasn’t even any maize. But gradually, by working very hard, they managed to get themselves a place up in the Altiplano. Nobody had worked the land there before. My father was eighteen by this time and was my grandmother’s right arm. He had to work day and night to provide for my grandmother and his brothers. Unfortunately that was just when they were rounding young men up for military service and they took my father off, leaving my grandmother on her own again with her two sons. My father learnt a lot of bad things in the army, but he also learnt to be a man. He said they treated you like an object and taught you everything by brute force. But he did learn how to fight. He was in the army for a long, hard year and when he got back home he found my grandmother was dying. She had a fever. This is very common among people who come from the coast where it’s very hot straight to the Altiplano where it’s very cold. The change is too abrupt for them. There was no money to buy medicine or to care for my grandmother and she died. My father and his brothers were left without parents or any other relatives to help them. My father told me that they had a little house made of straw, very humble, but with their mother dead, there was no point in staying there. So they split up and got work in different parts of the coast. My father found work in a monastery but he hardly earned anything there either. In those days a worker earned thirty to forty centavos a day, both in the fincas and elsewhere.
That’s when my father met my mother and they got married. They went through very difficult times together. They met in the Altiplano since my mother was from a very poor family too. Her parents were very poor and used to travel around looking for work. They were hardly ever at home in the Altiplano.
That’s how they came to settle up in the mountains. There was no town there. There was no-one. They founded a village up there. My village has a long history–a long and painful history. The land up there belonged to the government and you had to get permission to settle there. When you’d got permission, you had to pay a fee so that you could clear the land and then build your house. Through all my parents’ efforts in the fincas, they managed to get enough money together to pay the fee, and they cleared the land. Of course, it’s not very easy to make things grow on land that’s just been cleared. You don’t get a good yield for at least eight or nine years. So my parents cultivated the land and eight years later, it started to produce. We were growing up during this period. I had five older brothers and sisters. I saw my two eldest brothers die from lack of food when we were down in the fincas. Most Indian families suffer from malnutrition. Most of them don’t even reach fifteen years old. When children are growing and don’t get enough to eat, they’re often ill, and this…well…it complicates the situation.
So my parents stayed there. My mother found the trees and our amazing mountains so beautiful. She said that they’d get lost sometimes because the mountains were so high and not a single ray of light fell through the plants. It’s very dense. Well, that’s where we grew up. We loved our land very, very much, even if we did have to walk for a long time to get to our nearest neighbour. But, little by little, my parents got more and more people to come up and cultivate the land so there would be more of us to ward off the animals that came down from the mountains to eat our maize when it was ripe or when the ears were still green. These animals would come and eat everything. My father said that one of them was what they call a racoon. Soon my mother started keeping hens and a few sheep because there was plenty of room but she didn’t have the time to look after them properly so they’d wander off to find other food and not come back. The mountain animals ate some of them, or they just got lost. So they lived there, but unfortunately it was many years before our land really produced anything and my parents still had to go down and work in the fincas. They told us what it was like when they first settled there, but when we children were growing up and could spend four or five months of the year there, we were very happy. There were big rivers rushing down the mountainside below our house. We didn’t actually have much time for playing, but even working was fun–clearing the undergrowth while my father cut down trees. Well, you could hear so many different types of birds singing and there were lots of snakes to frighten us as well. We were happy even though it was very cold because of the mountains. And it’s a damp sort of cold.
I was born there. My mother already had five children, I think. Yes, I had five brothers and sisters and I’m the sixth. My mother said that she was working down on a finca until a month before I was born. She had just twenty days to go when she went up to the mountains, and she gave birth to me all on her own. My father wasn’t there because he had to work the month out on the finca.
Most of what I remember is after I was five. We spent four months in our little house in the Altiplano and the rest of the year we had to go down to the coast, either in the Boca Costa* where there’s coffee picking and also weeding out the coffee plants, or further down the south coast where there’s cotton. That was the work we did mostly, and I went from when I was very little. A very few families owned the vast areas of land which produce these crops for sale abroad. These landowners are the lords of vast extensions of land, then. So we’d work in the fincas for eight months and in January we’d go back up to the Altiplano to sow our crops. Where we live in the mountains–that is, where the land isn’t fertile–you can barely grow maize and beans. The land isn’t fertile enough for anything else. But on the coast the land is rich and you can grow anything. After we’d sown our crops, we’d go down to the coast again until it was time to harvest them, and then we’d make the journey back again. But the maize would soon run out, and we’d be back down again to earn some money. From what my parents said, they lived this harsh life for many years and they were always poor.
II
BIRTH CEREMONIES
‘Whoever may ask where we are, tell them what you know of us and nothing more.’
—Popol Vuh
‘Learn to protect yourselves, by keeping our secret.’
—Popol Vuh
In our community there is an elected representative, someone who is highly respected. He’s not a king but someone whom the community looks up to like a father. In our village, my father and mother were the representatives. Well, then the whole community becomes the children of the woman who’s elected. So, a mother, on her first day of pregnancy goes with her husband to tell these elected leaders that she’s going to have a child, because the child will not only belong to them but to the whole community, and must follow as far as he can our ancestors’ traditions. The leaders then pledge the support of the community and say: ‘We will help you, we will be the child’s second parents.’ They are known as abuelos, ‘grandparents’ or ‘forefathers’. The parents then ask the ‘grandparents’ to help them find the child some godparents, so that if he’s orphaned, he shouldn’t be tempted by any of the bad habits our people sometimes fall into. So the ‘grandparents’ and the parents choose the godparents together. It’s also the custom for the pregnant mother’s neighbours to visit her every day and take her little things, no matter how simple. They stay and talk to her, and she’ll tell them all her problems.
Later,