I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala is a memoir published by the K'iche' author and human rights activist Rigoberta Menchu in 1983. She dictated the book to Venezuelan author and anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos who is credited as a co-author. The book recounts Menchu's experiences as an activist campaigning against human rights abuses during the Guatemalan Civil War, which began in 1960 and didn't end until 1996, more than a decade after the publication of the memoir.

As a child, Menchu's family life is split between life in the Altiplano highlands, where she spends four months out of the year, and the lowland finca coffee plantations, where she spends eight months of the year working for Guatemalans of Spanish descent. Menchu, meanwhile, is K'iche,' an indigenous tribe of Guatemalans of Mayan descent. Life on the fincas is horrific. As workers, they are underfed and crammed into tiny living quarters. The owners of the fincas seem to have no regard for their lives, refusing to even wait for them to leave the fields before spraying them with pesticides. For those eight months, Menchu looks forward to returning home to the Altiplano highlands, where the indigenous tribes live with their own, embracing their own culture. The journey to and from the fincas is also perilous and intensely uncomfortable, as the workers are packed like sardines into the backs of trucks and covered by tarps. One day, after being starved and worked to the bone, Menchu's younger brother Nicolas dies. Menchu is almost angrier than she is sad, but she is confused about what she can do to prevent such atrocities from happening in the future.

When Menchu is eight years old, she accompanies her father to Guatemala City. This is the first time she becomes aware of the world outside the fincas and the Altiplano. The experience causes her to want to learn Spanish so she can explore more of the world and assimilate into it. At the same time, she is torn between her desire to explore the world and her desire to become a leader in her community like her father is. Despite the urge to stay with her people, when she is offered a job as a maid in Guatemala City, she eagerly accepts it.



Menchu expects the worldly, urbanized people of Guatemala City to be less discriminatory and racist toward her than the wealthy landowners who make her life a living hell eight months out of the year. Unfortunately, she finds this is not the case. She feels that the family dog receives better treatment than she does. Her best friend is a fellow domestic worker Candelaria, who speaks fluent Spanish and dresses in the style of the ladinos of Spanish descent. She idolizes Candelaria, wishing to emulate her. Candelaria also regularly rebels against the mistress of the home where they work, sabotaging her skin cream on at least one occasion. Although Candelaria is fired, her rebellious spirit resonates with Menchu, eventually inspiring her to greater things.

Completing her contract with the family, Menchu returns home, only to find that her father has been arrested. When the rich ladino landowners tried to steal their homeland in the Altiplano, her father stood up to them. In response, they threw him in jail. After securing her father's freedom, the family follows his lead in joining the newly formed Peasant Unity Committee created as a means for the Altiplano indigenous community to work together to resist the predations of the wealthy ladino landowners. Over time, the Guatemalan Army is brought in to try to take the land. In response, Menchu and her father are instrumental in leading the rest of the Unity Committee in their efforts to resist. Because the military is now involved, the indigenous communities begin to engage in guerilla tactics to defend their land, using small traps and attacking interlopers with small weapons like knives.

After successfully beating back a major push to take their land, Menchu takes it upon herself to travel to other indigenous communities to teach them how to resist the ladinos in the army. Unfortunately, as her profile rises and she attracts the attention of the Guatemalan elites, the army retaliates against her family, first killing her brother Petrocinio by burning him alive in front of her entire family. Later, her mother is kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed. Meanwhile, Menchu's father is killed after storming the Spanish embassy. With so much death visited upon her family, and having witnessed so many atrocities committed against peasants, Menchu eventually goes into exile. After a period of much-needed rest, she finds it difficult to rejoin the guerilla movement, even though her sisters are all currently involved in it. Instead, she shifts her attention to activism.