People/Community – LAST Thoughts and Reflections

In the book, I, Rigoberta Menchú, Menchú describes her life and experiences as a Quiché woman in an Indian community in Guatemala. Her co-author, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, describes in the introduction how she aimed to listen and document all that Menchú talked about in order to help reflect the Indian experience in Latin America. She recounts that as Menchú told stories from her personal life, she became “self-assured and contented” (p. xvi), and that Menchú found relief in becoming a voice that had gone so long unheard. The beginning of the book immediately confirms this, Menchú stating that her testimony is “not only [her] life, it’s also the testimony of [her] people” (p. 1). This idea made me wonder: Where do we draw the line between experiencing something as an individual vs. as a community? What makes this line different for colonial peoples compared to Indigenous peoples?

“My personal experience is the reality of a whole people” (p. 1).

Menchú forms a collective Indigenous voice through only her own narration, as her experience comes from being so deep within her community and living life as an undeniably Quiché woman. This is interesting in comparison to authors like Guaman Poma, who in his mestizo status has to justify himself in describing the Indian experience. Menchú’s experience is different, she has learned from a lifetime as an Indigenous woman, and importantly, she “didn’t learn it alone” (p. 1). Many parts of the book are dedicated to her personal experiences, but they are entangled with her community.

I believe that a lot of the reason her story is so personal when it is meant to represent a community is because of how rightfully distrusting the Indigenous peoples are of the people outside of their community, being “very careful not to disclose any details of their communities” (p. 9). The colonizers have already taken so much that traditional knowledge and information must be held onto tightly, so Menchú works around this by telling her story in personal anecdotes.

There are portions within the novel—like that of the birth ceremonies chapter, the nahual, and the marriage ceremonies—that are kept objective, where Menchú acts as a narrator. In the nahual chapter, Menchú maintains her narration while reminding the reader of how personal these traditions are:

“We often find it hard to talk about ourselves because we know we must hide so much in order to preserve our Indian culture and prevent it from being taken away from us. So I can only tell you very general things about the nahual. I can;t tell you what my nahual is because that is one of our secrets.” (p. 22)

I believe Menchú finds a healthy balance in her objectivity and personal experience, but it does open further questions towards how Burgos-Debray contextualizes her own involvement and where she personally finds the line in being the pen for a community she is not a part of.

José María Arguedas, author of Yawar Fiesta, was brought up a mestizo fluent in Quechua due to his living with Indigenous families while growing up. It is then not a surprise that he went on to use his place as an artist with Quechua perspective to write about Indigenous Andean culture. In Yawar Fiesta, this is exactly what he does, writing about the bullfight (turupukllay) that is a traditional custom of the Indigenous community in Peru. The novel is a reflection of the conflict between Indigenous peoples and the government of Peru, delving into the specificity of a subprefect who relays the information that the bullfight is no longer allowed by the ministry. Arguedas portrays the endless honor and power that the Indigenous peoples had in fighting for their tradition to be upheld.

Along with the story of a conflict, it is an observation of Peruvian Andean society, and he begins the novel by defining the five main characters of these big towns. One of these characters is that of the town mestizo. He describes this mestizo as a man who “does not know where he is going” (pp. xiii-xiv) and one that often follows in the government and lawmaker’s poor treatment of Indigenous people and attempts to simply blend into the crowd. This portrays mestizos of the time as people clinging to their colonial sides, moving into areas in the way that the colonial Spaniards were, as opposed to embracing their Indigenous heritage and living in traditional ways. This is an interesting choice as he himself is a mestizo. He goes on to describe in the first chapter how Puquio was itself an “Indian village” before the entrance of Spaniards and, later, mestizos. This implies in itself that he believes that the mestizos do not belong as Indigenous do. Does he consider himself different because of how he was embraced by Indigenous people for his childhood and upbringing?

In underlining how the Indigenous peoples preserved their cultural tradition and identity, it feels like he’s saying too, that it was a fight between Indigenous peoples and everyone else, i.e., the mistis and mestizos. I wonder how he personally differentiates himself, and if that is what caused the form in which he wrote the book, in Spanish with Quechua words, phrases, and inflections throughout. He does not see mestizos as one with the mistis, as they are differentiated in his cast of characters, but it is clear that they lean closer to the upper class of Puquio than it does the Indigenous people. What I’m asking, then, is where does José María Arguedas find himself in writing about the encroachment of mestizo people in Puquio?

LAST Thoughts and Reflections

Tag Archives: People/Community

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