This was a hard thing to read. I can only imagine what it was like to live. My anger is individual and small, focused on the soldiers that lost every ounce of their humanity. But I am also angry because of the many ways this story is entirely common. In her testimony, we learn from Menchu about how she lives. How her family strikes an intentional and powerful balance between the necessity of working the finka, and the pleasure in returning to the highlands. As we have learned all throughout this course, indigenous and specifically Mayan understandings of the world are very different to the settler and colonial ontoepistemologies. I’m sure it would appear ridiculous to a landed owner of a finka for people to leave and return to the cold highlands to harvest their ancestral crops when paid work existed down on the coast. I’m sure the collective nature of these living arrangements, the communal field that the village maintained in case anyone got sick, are what lead to the labelling of “communist.” But the tragic and inexcusable thing about understanding the world differently is that, from a colonial, capitalist logic it somehow justifies eradication of the other way of knowing the world. At this time the “Cold War” was about as hot as war can get in Latin America, and these global ideas of communism and capitalism were clashing in the minds of those who tell the people with guns who to shoot. But nothing like that exists for Menchu and her family. They are not communists, not because it is an overly complicated ideology, but because everything it has to offer is already represented in their ways of life. The reason communism inspires the industrialized worker is because it radically presumes that they are worth more than their labour, more than their time, and that together they can make it so. Those are presumptions already baked into the lives of Mayan communities. Life is not perfect, but the ways people relate to one another and their labour, their land, their gods, and those they do not understand are fundamentally deeper, caring, and inherently opposed to all the capitalist logics imposed on them. When that way of life gets in the way of profit, reliable labour, or a regime caught in a Cold War discourse, surrounded by national revolutions and reliant on American dollars to stay afloat, anything can happen in the countryside when only those that cannot speak Spanish can witness it. Who will they testify to and about what? That is the power of Menchu’s account, and her effort to learn to communicate in the same language as the oppressor has left a voice that can be heard more widely. I was wondering what people found most surprising about life in the highlands, or perhaps in her description of it? How did her chosen words colour your reading of her testimony?