Vicente Menchú Character Analysis

They told me I would have many ambitions but I wouldn’t have the opportunity to realize them. They said my life wouldn’t change, it would go on the same—work, poverty, suffering. At the same time, my parents thanked me for the contribution I’d made through my work, for having earned for all of us. Then they told me a bit about being a woman; that I would soon have my period and that was when a woman could start having children. They said that would happen one day, and for that they asked me to become closer to my mother so I could ask her everything.

I said: ‘Why don’t we burn all this so that people can’t come and work here any more?’ I hated the people who sprayed the crops. I felt they were responsible. ‘Why did they spray poison when people were working there?’ I was very upset when I went back home that time. I was with my neighbours and my older sister because my father had stayed up in the Altiplano. When I got home I told my mother that my friend had died. My mother cried and I said: ‘Mother, I don’t want to live. Why didn’t die when I was little? How can we go on living?’ My mother scolded me and told me not to be silly. But to me it wasn’t silly. They were very serious ideas.

The whole community helped get my father out. The landowners thought that my father was the king, the village chief, and that if they defeated the chief, they could defeat the whole community. But they soon realized that it wasn’t like that. My father carried out the wishes of the community. He didn’t make the laws.

We began thinking, with the help of other friends, other compañeros, that our enemies were not only the landowners who lived near us, and above all not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger, poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership of land. The best land was not in our hands. It belonged to the big landowners. Every time they see that we have new land, they try to throw us off it or steal it from us in other ways.

They told me I would have many ambitions but I wouldn’t have the opportunity to realize them. They said my life wouldn’t change, it would go on the same—work, poverty, suffering. At the same time, my parents thanked me for the contribution I’d made through my work, for having earned for all of us. Then they told me a bit about being a woman; that I would soon have my period and that was when a woman could start having children. They said that would happen one day, and for that they asked me to become closer to my mother so I could ask her everything.

I said: ‘Why don’t we burn all this so that people can’t come and work here any more?’ I hated the people who sprayed the crops. I felt they were responsible. ‘Why did they spray poison when people were working there?’ I was very upset when I went back home that time. I was with my neighbours and my older sister because my father had stayed up in the Altiplano. When I got home I told my mother that my friend had died. My mother cried and I said: ‘Mother, I don’t want to live. Why didn’t die when I was little? How can we go on living?’ My mother scolded me and told me not to be silly. But to me it wasn’t silly. They were very serious ideas.

The whole community helped get my father out. The landowners thought that my father was the king, the village chief, and that if they defeated the chief, they could defeat the whole community. But they soon realized that it wasn’t like that. My father carried out the wishes of the community. He didn’t make the laws.

We began thinking, with the help of other friends, other compañeros, that our enemies were not only the landowners who lived near us, and above all not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger, poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership of land. The best land was not in our hands. It belonged to the big landowners. Every time they see that we have new land, they try to throw us off it or steal it from us in other ways.