This book is like listening to someone speaking which I enjoyed. Instead of being written very factual and more formal it is quite informal which makes easy to engage with and read. The story though is quite sad. Rigioberta describes so much cruelty and difficulty that the poor indigenous Guatemalans must endure. And most if not all of their suffering is avoidable. Their lives are hard because others make their lives hard by cheating them, overworking them, killing them with toxic chemicals and starvation, and more. At one point she writes “They said I was beginning my life as a woman and I would want many things that I couldn’t have. They tried to tell me that, whatever my ambitions, I’d no way of achieving them. That’s how life is.” My parents told me that I could achieve my ambitions I just had to work for them. But not all parents get tell  their children that. It must be terrible to have to teach your children that their life will be hard and they cannot have ambitions or other things they want.

At one point Rigioberta says, “They say we Indians are dirty, but it’s our circumstances which force us to be like that.” This kind of stuck out to me because just from this one line you can see the root of so many problems in Guatemala. The racism that creates so much suffering and inequality that then leads to resistance and violence is stuck in a loop that creates a self fulfilling prophecy. The indigenous can only wash their clothes once a week and they work so much doing hard dirty work that them and their clothes of course get very dirty. And if you are getting up at 5 in the morning and getting home late and having to do chores then it is very understandable to just go to sleep. Being dirty is the least of their concerns but to outsiders it is a mark of their low class and low value as humans.

I was surprised by how strict the expectations to continue with tradition were. Not dressing in traditional clothes is seen as leading you down a road to ruin and it means a lack of dignity. But it does make sense that the indigenous Guatamalans hold so tightly to their traditions and culture because it could easily disappear. Outside forces want to assimilate them and make them “less Indian” so if they don’t fight to keep their culture alive and follow tradition they probably would disappear.