Translation of Spoken Text in Mi Libro es la Tierra: Rosa Ixchel (“My Book is the Land: Rosa Ixchel”)
Words and voice by Rosa Ixchel Tuyuc (originally in Spanish)
0’00’’—0’02’’: Well, my name is Rosa IxcheI.
0’08’’—0’12’’: I am from Guatemala, my parents are political refugees.
0’14’’—0’23’’: My mother is Mayan Kaqchikel and my father is Mayan K'iché, both with parents who disappeared during the genocide that took place in Guatemala.
0’38’’—0’46’’: My mother's leadership began from around that time. That’s when our organization was formed, which is called the National Coordinator of Widows of Guatemala [CONAVIGUA].
0’51’’—1’06’’: At the time, their main goal was the search for disappeared people, to fight for justice for war victims, and the cessation of forced military recruitment.
1’24’’—1’40’’: Since then, I’ve been working, mostly, on the issue of food sovereignty, historical memory, and educational initiatives for young people and women from the perspective of popular education.
1’53’’—2’00’’: Because the main reason why people leave our communities is hunger.
2’14’’—2’34’’: For us, food sovereignty is important because it allows you to become autonomous—you decide what to eat and how to produce it. It also gives you the freedom to decide what to do with your time and with your organizational and political work.
3’02’’—3’17’’: In the same way, we see popular education as a form of liberation. It’s a participatory teaching method that takes peopke’s knowledge as a starting point.
3’26’’—3’58’’: This is important because, Indigenous communities have often been told that they “don’t know”. So, to speak about popular education is to understand that Indigenous communities have their own way of knowing and knowledge. And so, we start from people’s experience and from their knowledge as community members who know their context and its difficulties as well as many of the solutions to them.
4’25’’—4’46’’: For me, historical memory relates to the collective experiences and events that are constructed collectively. Because there isn’t only one story, there are many stories which one can put together into a puzzle that explains how and why something happened.
4’51’’—5’05’’: In this case, when we talk about historical memory in Guatemala, we’re trying to understand, for example, what were the causes behind the organization of the guerrillas.
5’41’’—6’05’’: Our objective is to work for truth or for a history that includes the perspective of our communities, because our government spreads the idea that the guerrillas were the ones who killed all those people. From our organization’s “space of memory” we want to give voice to the communities’ truth and to hold the government and the army accountable for their participation in everything that took place.
6’11’’—6’28’’: Many times, it’s said that all those who were killed or forcefully disappeared were members of the guerrillas but many statistics show that many of them didn’t have a weapon, they had not even touched one when they were killed.
6’29’’—6’58’’: It’s also important to share the life stories of those who died is important. Many of them were artists or professors, they organized with the church, they worked at the cooperatives… but we also need to talk about their right to organize or not in the guerrillas. We want to vindicate their life stories.
7’35’’—7’57’’: People always tell us: ‘forget and forgive’ Who am I going to forgive? No one has asked me for forgiveness. So we want these events not go unpunished and for this form of power, which is still held by the same people, to change somehow.
8’07’’—8’27’’: This isn’t an easy task—we’re not succeeding in this—but that is what we hope, that History doesn’t repeat itself and, above all, we want the youth to be aware that our country’s political situation doesn’t come from nothing.
9’24’’—10’01’’: It’s necessary to work from the collective to be able to achieve a more dignified life that is fairer for everyone and that comes from a collective dream instead of an individual dream of “me” as someone who wants more. freedom or more opportunities. Rather, it’s about a more dignified life not only for us as human beings but for everything and everyone around us.
10’07’’—10’17’’: One can't talk about a dignified life when the rivers, the forests, the mountains, are being exploited.
11’13’’—11’27’’: In the political proposals of the Indigenous peoples we have always heard about taking just what’s necessary and to respect also the stone, the leaf, the tree.
12’55’’—13’14’’: We need to know what we need but we've gotten to the point where we find something and we want it all. And I think that's the problem: wanting to extract from Mother Earth everything she has.
13’54’’—14’14’’: We need to be collective beings and think about a more dignified life not only for you and the one next to you but for everyone and to fight for, as I've heard it out there, ‘a world where many worlds fit’.
14’42’’—14’57’’: Everything I am and everything I’ve experienced have a lot of collective knowledge and learning from others as its foundation.