Translation of Spoken Text in Mi Libro es la Tierra: Rosa Ixchel (“My Book is the Land: Rosa Ixchel”)
“Well, my name is Rosa IxcheI.
I am from Guatemala, from politically displaced parents.
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.
My mother's leadership started from around that time. That’s when they formed an organization called the National Coordinator of Widows of Guatemala [CONAVIGUA].
At the time, their banner of struggle was the search for disappeared people, to fight for justice for the victims of the war, and the cessation of forced military recruitment.
Since then, I have been working, above all, with the issue of food sovereignty, historical memory, and educational systems with women and youth from the perspective of popular education.
Because what is lacking a lot in our communities—which is why usually people are forced leave—is due to hunger.
For us, food sovereignty is important because it allows you to become autonomous by deciding what to eat and how to produce it. It also gives you more freedom to decide what to do with your time and organizational and political work.
In the same way, [we see] popular education as a form of liberation. It’s a participatory teaching method that comes from the knowledge of the people. This is important for Indigenous communities who have been regularly told that they “don’t know”.
So, to speak of popular education is to understand that they [we] have their [our] own way of knowing and knowledge.
We start from people’s experience and from their knowledge as community members who know not only their context and its difficulties but also many of the solutions there may be to its problems.
For me, historical memory relates to the experiences and events that are built collectively. Because there is not only one story, there are many stories with which one can put together a puzzle that explains how and why [something] happened.
In this case, when we talk about historical memory in Guatemala, we’re trying to understand, for example, what were the causes for the guerrillas to organize.
Our objective is to work for truth or for a History that includes the perspective of our communities, right?
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 truth of the people and to emphasize the responsibility of the government and the army for the events that occurred.
Many times, it’s said that all those who were killed or disappeared in our communities were guerrilla members but many statistics show that many of them did not have a weapon, they had not [even] touched a weapon when they were killed.