Life in a Spanish-Speaking Community - Essay Example

College: Life in Finca Rigoberta and her family spent most of their time in the finca, working for the Ladinos, who are Guatemalans of Spanish descent. Life at Finca was tough and Rigoberta, together with her family underwent hardships and oppression at the hands of the wealthy land owners. They used to pick coffee and cotton in the fields where they would spend up to eight months of a year working. Being a member of the indigenous Guatemalan community, which was also minority, they were disregarded, and were perceived as having little rights and were therefore mistreated by the Ladinos. Rigoberta tirelessly labored in the fields together with her family and community working for the ladino people who were owners of massive pieces of land in order to get money to get some of the basic necessities for her family. The Ladinos would not offer any food to Rigorberta and her community and sometimes people would die of starvation and malnutrition; her younger brother Nicolas being amongst those who succumbed to malnutrition and starvation. Rigoberta and her brother Nicolas were child laborers who picked coffee and cotton on the farms. For eight months, Rigoberta and her community would work in Finca and thereafter go back to their home in the Altiplano to farm. The soil around Altiplano is however infertile and their effort often produced little results. This is the life that she and her community lived for many years and there was not much they could show for their hard work in Finca were paid very little money as wages moreover the Ladinos forced them to buy supplies from their shops which had highly priced products. This meant that they were in constant debt and owed the powerful landowners money for the supplies they took and were not able to pay. The Ladinos intentionally paid low wages and put high prices on the supplies they sold so that the minority community where Rigoberta came from would rely on them fully given that their wages were insufficient to sustain them. This would force them to continue working in Finca so that they could at least get some of the basic necessities. The living conditions were also deplorable in Finca partly due to the poor pay and also sometime they were never paid. Some of the houses they lived in were small, cramped and unhygienic. And to get rid of some of the pests in the farm, the Ladino’s could sometimes spray Rigoberta’s community with pesticides that were used to spray the crops in the plantations. These pesticides would cause diseases community and they would not afford any money to go to hospitals for any treatment or buy medicine. Whenever a person became sick, they were not allowed permission to go get treatment and if one went to the hospital without prior notice or getting permission from their Ladino bosses, they would not receive their pay for that particular day or at times the Ladinos would refuse to pay any money at all. In one such instance, Nicolas, Rigoberta’s brother was suffering from malnutrition and starvation and Rigoberta’s mother, Juana Tum, tried to get time-off in so that she could take her son to hospital. She was not granted permission and Nicholas died. When she decided not to go to work to bury her son, she was denied pay for that entire month and she was finally sacked without compensation. Life in Finca was also tough because of lack of communication between the workers and their Ladino bosses. Rigoberta’s community, of the Kiche ethnic group, could not speak Spanish, and neither could they also communicate with other indigenous community in the Finca due to linguistic differences due to the different dialects spoken in Guatemala. This lack of communication made it almost impossible to get help from the indigenous residents of Finca. When Nicholas died for instance, Rigoberta and her mother did not know what to do or how to go about burying Nicolas and since they could not speak Spanish or a dialect that could be understood by the indigenous. With no place to bury her two year old son, corporal at the farm agreed to let Rigoberta’s mother bury Nicolas in Finca but at a fee that was supposed to be the tax for the land where Nicholas would be buried. There are many other numerous instances where Rigoberta’s community were highly exploited. Rigoberta’s people were controlled and had no form of rights or say in anything that was done in Finca. The powerful landowners are the ones who dictated everything about the lives of Rigoberta’s community. Whatever decisions were to be made, Rigoberta’s community would not be consulted and would be expected to follow what the Ladinos demanded. They were threatened with losing their jobs whenever they seemed to do things that threatened the power and authority of the Ladinos. During elections for instance, the landowners lied to Rigoberta’s community and gave them false promises and they were practically forced to vote since they could not understand what the landowner was talking about due to the language difference. They were also threatened with losing their jobs in the event that they did not make a mark where they were instructed to put on the voting papers. Any person who did not put a mark on the paper was going to lose their job, and losing their source of livelihood meant that there would be no salary at the end of the month. Since this was the sole means of making money for their families Rigoberta’s community voted without knowing exactly who or what they were voting for. The life of Rigoberta and her community at Finca is one full of injustice and overt exploitation that sometimes borders on the edge outright inhumanity. Their rights, even the most basic, were easily flouted by the wealth landowners. Being poor and without any other perceived means of getting basic needs, they were stuck to the farms even in those deplorable conditions rather than go back to their indigenous home. Work cited Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. New York: Verso , 1984. Read More