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Chapter 5
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
Rigoberta helped her mother from an early age, picking coffee or taking care of her baby brother so that her mother could work. Her mother was in charge of preparing food for the workers, a task that Rigoberta describes as very difficult. Her mother served others fresh ingredients even though her own family was given food that had gone bad. In addition to cooking, Rigoberta’s mother also picked coffee during breaks between meals to supplement her earnings, working all day from three in the morning until nightfall. Rigoberta remembers feeling helpless at seeing such hard work: she describes this as the moment her political consciousness was born. From this moment onward, she decided to earn her own money in order to support her mother.
Rigoberta’s mother is a model of endurance and devotion to her family; she spends all of her time working hard to make sure her family makes enough money, even if this involves sacrificing their own well-being. This this way, she accepts that her hard work will provide others with good food, whereas her own family might suffer from malnutrition. Rigoberta’s reflection that her political consciousness was born from witnessing her mother’s suffering confirms her conviction that political resistance and rebellion derive not from formal learning, but from personal experiences of oppression and injustice.
Themes
Whenever the children were sick, her mother spent all of their money on medicine. On one occasion, Rigoberta fell ill and nearly died on the finca. After this, she resolved to become tougher and to hide her physical difficulties adjusting to the abrupt change in climate between the mountains and the coast. At the age of eight, she began earning money, setting herself goals to collect 35 pounds of coffee and earn 25 cents. She sometimes had to work two days in a row to reach that objective, but she forced herself to do so out of commitment to her goals.
Rigoberta’s decision to hide her physical suffering and to work as a child reveals her dedication to her family. She already behaves like an adult, aware of her responsibilities toward others and willing to sacrifice her well-being and her childhood in order to help her family get by. This attitude reveals her acceptance of suffering as a way of life: she has no other choice but to work hard if she wants her family to survive.
Themes
Rigoberta had to pick coffee beans very carefully, since breaking branches meant money would be deducted from their salary. She compares picking coffee to taking care of a wounded human being and explains that this work taught her to be extremely gentle in her actions. For years, she was paid the same amount of money, despite collecting increasingly greater amounts of coffee. Only after two years, when she was collecting 75 pounds of coffee at a time, did they increase her salary to 35 cents.
There’s a vast discrepancy between the amount of coffee Rigoberta collects and her salary, which is only raised by 10 cents, despite the fact that she is collecting more than double the initial amount of coffee. This reveals one of the many injustices of this finca system, which seeks to exploit workers and take advantage of their vulnerability, rather than pay them a fair wage for their hard work. Rigoberta’s association of picking coffee with helping others highlights the fact that suffering can have some positive consequences, as people may be able to transform these experiences into generosity and resistance.
Themes
When Rigoberta fell ill, she returned with her family to the Altiplano, where it was time to begin cultivating maize anyway. Her family was happy in the mountains, despite the hard work and the discomfort of the rainy, windy weather, which their house and their few clothes did not protect them from. Working together was also a source of joy, because while they were on fincas, Rigoberta’s father worked away from the family and they did not see him for months at a time. Nevertheless, living conditions in the fincas were nearly unbearable, as hundreds of people lived together under the same roof.
Given Rigoberta’s family’s joy at working in the mountains, it transpires that what Rigoberta’s community despises is not hard work per se, but the inhumane work conditions in the fincas. This environment stifles any possibility of developing a caring, nurturing contact with nature and with other human beings. Harsh work conditions, Rigoberta suggests, are bearable if they are undertaken in a spirit of respect, love, and sharing, as she is able to experience when working with her family in the mountains.
Themes
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Rigoberta then explains what living conditions are like for women in Guatemala. Most women workers have nine or 10 children, half of whom are likely to die of malnutrition. Rigoberta describes these women’s courage in dealing with tough situations, including being forced to bury their own children. She also mentions that men from the army often sexually abuse young girls. Some women turn to prostitution if they don’t have families to help support them and do not earn enough money through their work in the fincas. She notes that this did not exist in her Indian community, where strict dress codes were respected in the name of dignity and respect for their ancestors’ customs.
Rigoberta’s description of the specific problems that women face reveals that poverty and exploitation create particularly difficult circumstances for women, due to their special responsibility for giving birth and caring for their children. Rigoberta’s comments about prostitution equate it with misbehavior and disrespect for community rules: adopting a strict dress code, she argues, should be enough to ward off such activities. However, this perspective does not take into account severe economic pressures and gender-specific issues: the exploitative system takes advantage of women’s bodies in a way that men are not as vulnerable to.
Themes
