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Rigoberta Menchu and the Indigenous of Guatemala

Suffering is Our Fate

After many years and many trips to Mexico, where mestizaje reigns, I recently ventured to Guatemala. Here I hoped to find a culture more clearly marked by the indigenous. Coming in the new millennium, I found instead a civilization in flux and, paradoxically, a nation quiet after the storm.

I found a declining indigenous ethos in Guatemala, the result in great part of many years of racial strife. More people wore western dress than the travel posters suggested, more spoke Spanish, more were devoutly, although syncretically, Christian. Forty years of aggression had taught the Indians that their survival depended on relinquishing their ancestry. If they couldn't change the color of their skin, they'd have to unhitch the ties that have kept them at one with their community, milpa (corn/maizefield), with nature, with their history.

The war

The fighting ended in 1996 after countless thousands of peasant, religious, and military deaths. Guatemala is relatively calm today as a host of aid organizations try to put the country back on its feet. The war was a complex affair in which ethnic cleansing was salient if not defining, although the immediate struggle was over the attempts by the already landed, abetted by government and army, to wrest from the Indians their sacred and fecund lands. As the lands were increasingly appropriated, Indians began to resist; some had restitution immediately in sight, and others farther-reaching ideals and aims: to overthrow an entrenched global system in which the wealthy and powerful keep impoverished and bound the majority of the world's people.

Typically, it was the darker-skinned set upon by the lighter--officially there are no Caucasian Guatemalans, but those with more European blood, the Ladinos, own and rule--the once native exterminating the still native. Race and culture became inextricable. If you renounce your culture--your dress, language, traditional beliefs--you renounce your skin. And you may join the ranks of the oppressor.

I, Rigoberta Menchu...

I wanted to learn more about this civilization in transition and the war. I turned to "I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman in Guatemala." (Verso, 1984) Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992 for her work organizing for indigenous rights--to keep their land and treasured identity, and to exist--during the latter part of the struggle. Hers is an understandably awkward, sometimes naïve tale, told dryly and in humility. The backdrop is unrelenting violence, brutality.

Regrettably, several of the personal details of her account have been questioned if not discredited. (See David Stoll's book, "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans" Westview, 2000) When Rigoberta Menchu offers that she bears the "testimony of my people, my personal experience is the reality of a whole people," I try to read it as a disclaimer, an indication that she has allowed the personal to become universal in order to advance a just cause, an admission of the ends justifying the means. If Menchu's own brother didn't die of malnutrition, surely countless others' siblings did.

Rigoberta understands clearly the insidiousness of the Faustian bargain that makes the resolve to maintain integrity that much more difficult. When The Other was, yesterday, your sister in traje (traditional dress) with three undernourished babies on her waist, or your son sweating for slave wages on the coffee plantations, but today a factory worker in lipstick and jeans or a militare in shoes and salary, it makes you wonder why you bother to resist.

Thus I found small villages with a defining number of people in western dress, speaking Spanish, selling imported produce, including corn, crowding Evangelical, Mormon and Roman Catholic churches. And learned of the numbers of indigenous youth, come to the cities, members now of violent gangs.

Ultimately a Christian, Ms. Menchu must love her immediate oppressor as a fellow victim. She relates that when a soldier is captured in her village (a great number of the marauding army were indigenous), the townswomen set to reeducate him, entreating him "to take a message back to the army, telling all the soldiers there to think of our ancestors. We made him see that it wasn't the soldiers who were guilty but the rich who don't risk their lives." (p. 138)

suffering is our fate

She is a Quiche, a member of Guatemala's largest subgroup of Mayans, born piss poor, she tells us, in the mountains of El Quiche in the northwest Altiplano, distinguished at birth by her parents, esteemed elected leaders of their community. Her story details the cultural legacy she inherited from her ancestors, one purely indigenous, predicated upon the ascendancy of community over individual, the veneration of the natural world, the ancient axiom that we are put on this earth to suffer, underscored and perpetuated by the advent of the White Man

Even before children come into the world, the "fruit of communal love", they will have learned from their parents that "suffering is our fate." They will have been instructed as well to "be respectful and live through [the] pain." When a child is ten, he/she enters adulthood. In assuming the responsibilities of an adult, doing an adult day's work on the plantation or the milpa, raising hogs, taking care of the home, young Rigoberta was told, "I would have many ambitions but I wouldn't have the opportunity to realize them, my life wouldn't change it would go on the same--work, poverty, suffering." (p. 48)

Poignantly, amongst all the rituals described, pre-birth, birth and baptism, rites of passage, death, Ms. Menchu most painstakingly details marriage, revealing that marriage doesn't seek personal happiness, although it can be dissolved, but is "for us something joyful because the concept our ancestors had was that our race must not die out." (p. 223). Later, she confides that she rejected marriage, ending a long-term relationship in order to devote her life to the struggle.

Violence is eschewed, even the killing of animals, the trees must be consulted before they may be used for mankind's sustenance, land is mostly communally owned and worked, people live for the betterment of each other, and there is no word "god". He, as the sun, is tied to the earth, reached by "lov[ing] beans, maize, the earth." These, her people's values, are unassailable and superior.

It is thus puzzling to find her, as her consciousness is piqued and activism begins, being converted to Catholicism, to adopt the very system of beliefs that has been used to bind her. For Menchu, however, there is no contradiction as she abandons the pacifism of the Maya and looks to Judith, who takes the head of her oppressor, Holofernes, and David who slew Goliath, and to those Christian clerics willing to give their lives for her cause.

The murder of her father, firebombed by the army, in 1980, as he led scores of protesters to occupy the Spanish Embassy in order to bring word of the Indians' plight to the world, is a turning point. Now she moves from the familiarity of her village and people to the nationwide struggle, risking her own life as did both parents, on the road to universal recognition.

...on the moral high road

Rigoberta Menchu's story and the traditions of her people--"Men of Maize," as novelist Miguel Angel Asturias characterizes them--reveals a subtext that may go more to the heart of the genocide than racial identity and greed. It is the deep, threatening clash of righteous primal values against ad hoc opportunism. We find a traditional people on the moral high road, bequeathed with intimidating integrity, an even self-defeating reverence for nature, an encrusted loyalty to the community over the individual, an eschewal of happiness, confronting an individualistic, materialistic, nominal and debased Christianity. Surely shamed, the latter-day civilization would feel the need to shatter the mirror to their (our) soul.