Rigoberta Menchu

Rigoberta Menchu

Rigoberta Menchu Tum is a Maya-Quiche Indian from Guatemala, she belongs to one of the many ethnic groups in Guatemala; there are twenty other ethnic groups, many of these group share the same culture, but they speak a slightly different dialect. She lives with her parents in Chimel, a small village in northern Altiplano. His father Vicente Menchu and his mother are community leaders and are considered very important in her community. Menchu have many brothers and sisters; they all worked in different coffee and cotton farms all over the department (state) of Quiche.

The community, in which Rigoberta and her parents live, is a very caring world in which everyone works for the interest of the community. In this community, children at birth belong to everyone and not just their parents. The entire community participates in the education of children prioritizing the respect for nature as a whole and the importance of being part of the community. They also encourage the preservation of their culture, values, language and secrets of the community; this is very important because their identity is the only thing that they really have. They have a Maize (corn) diet, for them and for most of the Guatemalans Maize is sacred.

Rigoberta is the sixth child of the family. As a child she had to work in coffee and cotton farms with her brothers to help support the family. the Menchu family suffered hunger and mistreatment from the ladinos, hunger would become a concurrent issue in Menchu’s family; one of her brothers died very young because of malnutrition, the dead of his brothers to malnutrition is not an isolated event, Rigoberta witnessed the death of many other young children in her community and the farms where she used to work, these kids died as a result of a poor diet and malnutrition.

She started working as a catechist teaching the Bible to other kinds in her community when she was eight, when she turned 12 she started learning the values and custom that old girl learn to become a woman. Her mother taught her everything she needed to know to become a decent Indian woman. Meanwhile the social situation of the indigenous population in Guatemala went from bad to worse, the persecution and abuses towards indigenous were more and more aggressive and common in her community. Her father, aware of this, was very committed to fight to defend and to protect the community by organizing his community to fight back the abuses of the ladinos and the government.

After this, the ladinos and the government tried to forced the displacement of Menchu’s community, Rigoberta became more involve in protecting her family and her community, then Rigoberta enlists in the CUC (Committee Peasant Unity). She also decided to learn Spanish to overcome the language barrier that makes it difficult to work with other indigenous groups. In this stage, she realized that the situation of her community was not an isolated event but violence and repression was taking place all over Guatemala so she and her family decided to spread their experiences by going to other communities and organizing them. To carry their homework, the members of her must be separated, and although the protagonist suffers greatly from the repeated absences of her father, she understood very well the truth of this situation, for her, the need to make people aware of this situation was greater than the sacrifice of not being with her family. As she travels all over Guatemala, she meet more Ladinos that would change her way of thinking, she learned that not all ladinos are the same, there are many ladinos that are as poor as Rigoberta and also suffered exploitation by the government and the upper classes.

For his activities considered subversive, the Menchus will suffer misfortunes and death. First, his father will be imprisoned for a year or so, release and stopped again. From this moment he will be constantly pursued and will have to live the rest of his life in secret until his assassination in January 1979, in the assault of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City. Then, it would be his brother who was burned to death before her eyes after being tortured by a group of soldiers, her brother was only 15 and he was not a tread to the government as the other members of the family. Finally, her mother will be captured, raped and assassinated by the army. From this point on, the life of Rigoberta would be dedicated entirely to fight for everyone who was oppressed, she learned to be better organizer, she also taught traditional self-defense techniques with rudimentary weapons, she also applied war techniques from the Bible and his Christian faith to protect communities and herself. While repression hardens, Rigoberta strengthens its fight with the help of the other groups defending the rights of indigenous people all over Guatemala.

The testimonio of Rigoberta Menchu is an incredible story of what millions of indigenous people in Latin America and the United States face every day. Her book goes over stories that can be related to anyone in Latin America. For example, she talks about Ladinos taking advantage of indigenous in the fincas. Although it has been almost 30 years since this book was written, today right now in the United States we have people being exploited just as Menchu and her family were exploited 30 years ago. This book brought me back to the 2004 “Immokalee tierra de esclavos” documentary produced by Alberto Tinoco Guadarrama. The documentary is collection of testimonies by people working in Immokalee, Fl. Immokalee is a small town in Florida of barely 20,000 people that base its economy in the tomato picking, these people, mostly undocumented indigenous

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