The K'iche Indigenous Peoples of the World
I heard Rigoberta Menchú speak for the first time in Toronto on February 6, 1988. That very day The Globe and Mail ran a travel feature with the headline “Guatemala in Style for a Mere $5 a Day.” Whether she or the organizers of the human rights conference she came to address noticed the coincidence, I don’t know. I suspect, however, that the image of Guatemala it projected would not have been to their liking. It is unclear from the piece whether the writer, Margaret Piton, had actually visited Guatemala: she provides the prospective tourist with a long list of enticements, but these are mostly culled from Paul Glassman’s Guatemala Guide. Piton packages Guatemala as cheap, romantic, and not to be missed by anyone interested in an exotic travel experience. She writes: The ideal travel destination would probably be a country with beautiful scenery, a spring-like climate, nice beaches, historic buildings and ruins, fine handicrafts, and low prices. Such a country does exist—and it isn’t on the other side of the world. Guatemala has all the above attributes and can be easily reached in a day’s travel. Piton goes on at length about the glories of Guatemala. Then, toward the end of her piece, she offers the following reflection: There is no such thing as a perfect travel destination and Guatemala, like every country, has problems. Poverty is widespread and petty theft is common in some areas—especially markets. Political violence flares up from time to time, although the situation seems to have improved with the present civilian government. The Guatemala that Rigoberta Menchú speaks of is far removed from the “low prices,” “beautiful beaches,” and “tasty, filling meals” that Margaret Piton writes about. Menchú’s message to the people gathered in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity—that we live in a careless world, one that acts wantonly and forgets too easily—could not have been more opportune. Menchú first recounted the details of her life in Guatemala in an oral history given shape, structure, and the authority of print by Elisabeth BurgosDebray, a Venezuelan scholar who pieced together, in autobiographical form, interviews she conducted with Menchú in Paris in 1982. After the publication of her testimony in Spanish in 1983—an English translation, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, appeared a year later—Menchú began to travel across Europe and North America speaking about her beloved but tormented Guatemala. Her work as a human rights activist was instrumental in her being awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. An indigenous Guatemalan of K’iche’ Maya lineage, Menchú was twentythree years old when she and Burgos-Debray recorded her testimony. BurgosDebray recalls: Rigoberta spent a week in Paris. In order to make things easier and to make the best possible use of her time, she came to stay with me. Every day for a week, we began to record her story at nine in the morning, broke for lunch about one, and then continued until six in the evening. We often worked after dinner too, either making more recordings or preparing questions for the next day. At the end of the week I had twenty-four hours of conversation on tape. The transition from spoken to written word, Burgos-Debray informs us, involved two key stages: I began by transcribing all the tapes. By that I mean that nothing was left out, not a word, even if it was used incorrectly or was later changed. I altered neither the style nor the sentence structure. The Spanish original covers almost five hundred pages of typescript. Burgos-Debray then set about the tricky job of editing Menchú’s words in order to lend them narrative coherence: I soon reached the decision to give the manuscript the form of a monologue: that was how it came back to me as I re-read it. I therefore decided to delete all my questions. By doing so I became what I really was: Rigoberta’s listener. I allowed her to speak and then became her instrument, her double. . . . This decision made my task more difficult, as I had to insert linking passages if the manuscript was to read like a monologue, like one continuous narrative. I then divided it into chapters organized around the themes I had already identified. I followed my original chronological outline, even though our conversations had not done so, so as to make the text more accessible to the reader. The text created by Burgos-Debray, like that of most oral histories, is not without its flaws. Menchú is at times repetitious, obscure, vague, and inconsistent. She collapses separate episodes into a single event, mixing time and place in ways that incense academic purists, especially those who believe in the myth of objective social science. Collective memory is of necessity selective memory, subjective memory. Such ways of remembering are simply how the K’iche’ and other oral cultures operate. They are also, in large measure, the reason why Menchú’s testimony has such universal appeal: the voice that working with Burgos-Debray has given her speaks as much for an entire people as for one person. Her experiences in Guatemala also form the centerpiece of a documentary film, When the Mountains Tremble (1983). Soon after her week in Paris with Burgos-Debray, long before the heady days of the Nobel laureate, Menchú became an important cultural icon. This unusual status for a Maya woman is linked directly to the power of her testimony. Menchú begins by telling about her father, mother, brothers, and sisters, and about growing up not just in the remote highland village where she was born but also on plantations on the Pacific coast where her family, like most Maya families, spent part of each year picking coffee or cotton. The trip from the altiplano, or highlands, down to the plantations, known in Guatemala as fincas, is not one for a delicate stomach: I remember the journey by lorry very well. . . . The lorry holds about forty people. But in with the people go the animals (dogs, cats, chickens), which the people from the altiplano take with them while they are in the finca. . . . It sometimes took two nights and a day from my village to the coast. During the trip the animals and the small children used to dirty the lorry and you’d get people vomiting and wetting themselves. . . . The lorry is covered with a tarpaulin so you can’t see the countryside you’re passing through. . . . The stuffiness inside the lorry with the cover on, and the smell of urine and vomit, make you want to be sick yourself just from being in there. By the time we got to the finca, we were totally stupefied; we were like chickens coming out of a pot.
Time spent working on fincas, Menchú tells us, was followed by a spell serving as a maid in a well-to-do household. Menchú’s recollection of domestic service abounds in details of abuse and degradation: The food they gave me was a few beans with some very hard tortillas. There was a dog in the house, a pretty, white, fat dog. 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. Washing dishes and mopping floors, however, was not without reward, for it was in such exploited keep that Menchú groped toward a better knowledge of Spanish. Becoming fluent in Spanish changed her life. Following the example of her father, a community activist, in 1977 Menchú joined a peasant organization responsible for raising the political consciousness of rural workers. Being bilingual meant that as well as canvassing in her own and other K’iche’- speaking communities, she could travel throughout Guatemala and communicate with Spanish-speaking Ladinos who, in her words, “also live in terrible conditions, the same as we [Mayas] do.” By the late 1970s, as civil war between guerrillas and the national armed forces began to take a heavy toll, Menchú aligned herself firmly on the side of the insurgents, committed to revolution as the only means of achieving peasant demands for human rights and social justice. Counterinsurgency war has scarred Menchú’s life, like that of many Guatemalans, in horrific ways. Of a list of family members numbering fifteen, seven met their death violently, including her parents, Vicente and Juana. Her father was burned alive on January 31, 1980, in a blaze that gutted the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City when it was fired at by government security forces ordered to end a peaceful occupation by leaders protesting against repression in the countryside. Several weeks later her mother was kidnapped, beaten, and raped, left to die after being dumped by the army on a deserted hillside far from the Menchú family home: When my mother died, the soldiers stood over her and urinated in her mouth; even after she was dead! Then they left a permanent sentry there to guard her body so that no-one could take it away, not even what was left of it. The soldiers were there right by her body, and they could smell my mother when she started to smell very strongly. They were there right by her; they ate near her, and, if the animals will excuse me, I believe not even animals act like that, like those savages in the army. After that, my mother was eaten by animals; by dogs, by all the zopilotes [vultures]. Menchú states that the soldiers stayed at the site for four months, “until they saw that not a bit of my mother was left, not even her bones, and then they went away.” In Crossing Borders, a sequel to I, Rigoberta Menchú published in 1998, Menchú informs us that her mother’s death occurred soon after she fled Guatemala for the safety of exile in Mexico. Of that last farewell, she writes: I will never get over the trauma of having left my mother so shortly before her death. It was my last chance to feel a mother’s warmth. If I had known, I would at least have paused to look at her, to gaze at her face for the last time. I would have tried, to the very last, to learn more about her. All I could think of in my misery was that I had to go away. Since the publication of her life story, Menchú has been criticized on the grounds of authority and accuracy by several commentators, most notably (and at greatest length) by anthropologist David Stoll in his book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999). Menchú reveals in Crossing Borders that Guatemalan historian Arturo Taracena “was the one who persuaded me to write my book.” Menchú took Taracena’s advice “because he had followed the whole story and thought it would be an injustice to a time and a people if we didn’t relate it.” She confesses, “After the text was compiled, I spent about two months trying to understand it,” and also divulges that “seeing it on paper is very different from talking into a tape recorder.” Menchú elaborates: I realize now how shy I was. I still am, but not as much as I used to be. In those days I was innocent and naive. When I wrote that book, I simply did not know the commercial rules. I was just happy to be alive to tell my story. I had no idea about an author’s copyright. I had to ask the compañeros in Mexico to help me understand the text, and it was painful to have to relive the content of the book. I censured several parts that might have been dangerous for people. I took out bits that referred to my village, details about my brothers and sisters, and names of people. That is why the book lacks a more specific identity and I feel it will be my duty to provide this before I die.
