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Chapter 14
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in I, Rigoberta Menchú, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Tolerance vs. Resistance
Class, Race, and Inequality
Ancestors, Tradition, and Community
Gender and Sexuality
Language, Education, and Power
Spirituality, Nature, and the Sacredness of Life
Summary
Analysis
This was Rigoberta’s father’s first time in prison. Landowners bribed judges to put her father in prison for 18 years, taking advantage of the fact that Indians don’t speak Spanish and cannot defend themselves. Their goal was to keep Rigoberta’s father from fighting against the landowners who were trying to take over the village’s lands. The entire legal system—which included officials such as the military commissioner, the mayor, and the governor, all ladinos—leaves poor, uneducated people disadvantaged. Money was used at each step of the way, whether to bribe officials or to hire lawyers.
Rigoberta’s father’s imprisonment marks a turning point in Rigoberta’s life, but also in the organization of her community. It illuminates the injustice of an entire political and legal system that leaves poor Indians defenseless. Allied with rich landowners, the corrupt legal system seeks to suppress any possible resistance to land appropriation. This way, rich ladinos can extend their wealth and power without considering the livelihood of the peasants they displace.
Themes
Rigoberta’s father had been fighting against two families, the Brols and the Garcías, who paid engineers and inspectors from the government to measure the village’s lands in order to appropriate it. Rigoberta’s father gathered signatures in the village to bring to INTA to defend their cause. However, he was then tricked into signing a paper he could not read, which asserted that the peasants were willing to leave their land. Rigoberta concludes that officials took advantage of her father’s naiveté. What neither her father nor the rest of the village realized at the time, Rigoberta argues, is that the government authorities and the landowners shared the same interests. Thus, they would try to repress the peasants’ desire for their own land.
Rigoberta’s discussion of her father’s negative experiences with the government and the law suggests that one of the obstacles to justice is educational. Without literacy or a knowledge of Spanish, poor Indians find themselves at the mercy of manipulative institutions.
Themes
In 1967, henchmen from the García family—many of whom came from Indigenous communities themselves—forced everyone out of the village. They destroyed or stole the villagers’ belongings, including their precious, handmade earthenware pots. As Rigoberta relates with deep feeling, the henchman threw the pots against the ground to break them. This episode reinforced Rigoberta’s hatred of the ladinos, whom she considered criminals. These men even killed the village’s dogs, which, to the Indian community, is a terrible offense, given their deep link to the natural world. Killing an animal, Rigoberta concludes, is the same as killing a human being.
These events reveal that even members of vulnerable communities can turn against their own group and support violence against the poor. Although not yet directed against human beings per se, many of the henchmen’s actions are deeply symbolic: destroying the community’s earthenware pots equates to threatening the very foundations of their culture, since such utensils play such an important role in the community’s spiritual beliefs. Killing the villagers’ dogs is also egregious to the Maya-Quiché, since they consider animal life just as sacred as human life. These violent deeds reveal to Rigoberta’s village that not only their physical survival, but their culture’s entire way of life, is in danger.
Themes
After this event, Rigoberta’s father decided that the community should resist, even if this meant putting their lives in danger. They refused the landowners’ offer to work as laborers on their land, although they did not yet have the political savvy to organize as a group and plan collective protests. This led to a second raid, in which people’s belongings were destroyed once again. Rigoberta’s grandfather argued that, in the past, the land had neither owners nor boundaries: it belonged to everyone. He declared that, if these men killed their animals, the villagers should kill these men in return. Rigoberta’s father, on the other hand, preferred to focus on defending the land.
The debates between Rigoberta’s father and grandfather reveal two different attitudes toward self-defense. Her grandfather advocates for a violent strategy (which aligns with the actions of guerilla fighters, who choose violent methods to combat oppression). Her father, on the other hand, advocates for an alternative centered on self-defense and legal actions. It remains to be seen which strategy Rigoberta’s family members (and members of her community more broadly) will choose.
Themes
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These difficult circumstances forced the villagers to momentarily put their ceremonies aside, due to lack of time, and to unite against the landowners. The tension grew among the two groups, and the INTA finally came to the village with a piece of paper, claiming that this would give the peasants freedom over the land. Everyone in the community signed the paper. However, this was another trick. Over the course of two years, the villagers took care of their crops, buoyed by the dream of reaping what the earth would give them. But after this period of time, they discovered that the document they signed only gave them rights over the land for two years.
The villagers’ willingness to sacrifice their spiritual and cultural practices in order to prioritize survival highlights a change in attitude in the villagers’ approach to suffering. They are willing to endure a certain amount of oppression and exploitation, only as long as it does not put the very foundations of their community in danger. Taking over their land, however, threatens their spiritual practices and their connection with nature. This motivates the villagers to resist against aggressive landowners, even if this means temporarily sacrificing some aspects of their way of life.
Themes
This led Rigoberta’s father to turn to unions for help. He spent an incredible about of time talking to lawyers, governmental agencies and unions. He knew he might be killed in the process, and he wanted his children to continue the fight if that happened. The landowners succeeded in getting him arrested, accusing him of “compromising the sovereignty of the state.” For an entire year, Rigoberta, her family, and the community devoted all of their resources to paying for lawyers to help her father. Having given up her work as a maid, Rigoberta worked in the fincas. This collective support forced the landowners to realize that Rigoberta’s father was not a chief acting on his own, but that he was the spokesperson of an entire community, willing to stand up for their rights.
Rigoberta’s father understands that Guatemala is not a democracy, but a system based on domination by rich ladino landowners. Any threat to this system, he realizes (such as Indians’ requests for a fair distribution of land), puts this domination at risk. The landowners’ reaction is to eliminate any threat to their control or sovereignty,” be it by imprisoning or killing opponents. However, the capacity for Rigoberta’s village to organize, in a collective and democratic fashion, reveals that eliminating Indian resistance is not as simple as killing a few leaders. Rather, it would involve fighting against entire communities.
Themes
After one year and two months, Rigoberta’s father was finally released. He left prison filled with even more courage than before, determined to fight the landowners. After a few months, however, the landowners kidnapped him. Present on the scene, Rigoberta’s brother alerted the village, which armed itself and launched a search. They found Rigoberta’s father lying alone, his body showing clear signs of torture. He lacked hair on one side of his head and had numerous wounds and so many broken bones that he couldn’t move. They took him, dying, to a health center that refused to help after having been bribed by the landowners. Finally, they called an ambulance to take him to another part of El Quiché. Rigoberta’s mother went to work in that town to pay for her husband’s medication and care.
Rigoberta’s’ father’s political engagement following many months of imprisonment serves as an early illustration of one of Rigoberta’s convictions: that even the most abject suffering can have positive consequences, if anger and pain are used to fight for long-term justice and equality. At the same time, Rigoberta’s father’s violent fate foreshadows the terrible costs of such political resistance. The upper class in Guatemala—which is protected by an alliance between landowners and government institutions—is willing to repress peaceful resistance through violence.
Themes
The community then received a message saying that the landowners were planning to kidnap Rigoberta’s father from the hospital. With help from nuns and priests, the community succeeded in hiding him away in a secret place. After nearly one year of medical care, Rigoberta’s father returned home, physically incapacitated but full of renewed hatred for his enemies. This anger extended beyond the landowners to all the ladinos. In the hospital, however, after talking to various people, Rigoberta’s father discovered the extent to which different Indian communities share the same problems concerning land ownership. This broadened his perspective on his own community’s problems.
Rigoberta’s father’s experiences in prison and in the hospital have unintended positive consequences. They allow him to interact with people outside of his native Indigenous community, and to understand that the problems that affect his community are actually widespread across the country. These early experiences help explain how Rigoberta’s community’s experience is part of a nationwide conflict: oppression is not limited to specific geographic zones but extends to all poor Indians. Despite their divisions in language and culture, all of these groups suffer from the same oppressive circumstances.
Themes
In 1977, Rigoberta’s father was sent to prison once more. Again, he told his family not to put his trust only in him, but in the entire community, which would serve as a father for them if ever he disappeared for good. The community received help from priests and nuns (who taught Rigoberta some Spanish) as well as some European benefactors. This time, Rigoberta’s father was considered a political prisoner, a communist, and was sentenced to life in prison. However, thanks to the community’s organization (which was strengthened throughout these ordeals) as well as the unions’ activism, Rigoberta’s father was soon released. Nevertheless, the authorities—who were united with the landowners—threatened him once more, telling him he would be killed if he continued his work.
If Rigoberta’s father insists that his family trust not only in him, but in the entire community, this is merely out of humility. Rather, this insistence underlines his belief that he is not acting alone, but that he is keeping the struggle of their ancestors alive. In other words, what makes him admirable, is not an individual set of specific qualities, but his commitment to represent the voice of an entire community. In the same way that he sacrifices his life for his village, his village, too, devotes its resources to protecting him—he is simply one element in a large web of solidarity and cooperation. If his activism seeks to keep their ancestors’ struggles alive, others—in particular, their village and his family—should work hard to replace him after his death.
Themes
In prison, Rigoberta’s father met a real political prisoner who taught him about uniting the peasants in a peasants’ league. The prisoner identified the root of these problems not in landowners alone, but in the entire system, which oppresses the poor. This led Rigoberta’s father to discuss the creation of the CUC, or the Committee for Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina), with other peasants. To avoid being kidnapped, he went into hiding. The new ideas he brought, however, led the community to realize that their suffering encompassed broader problems such as malnutrition and poverty. The community concluded that land ownership was the root of all these issues, since rich landowners had the best land in the country and were eager to maintain their dominance over the poor.
Rigoberta’s father’s new ideas about systemic oppression lead to a profound transformation in his community’s approach to suffering. Whereas, up until this point, the villagers were willing to accept a certain degree of suffering as inevitable, they now realize that the problems they have always taken for granted are neither immutable nor acceptable.
Themes
