“A revolutionary isn’t born out of something good,” said my sister. “He is born out of wretchedness and bitterness. This just gives us one more reason. We have to fight without measuring our suffering, or what we experience, or thinking about the monstrous things we must bear in life.”

This passage occurs in Chapter XXXIII, when Rigoberta has gone into hiding in Guatemala. It is one of the few times we hear from Rigoberta’s sister, age twelve, who remains nameless. In the following chapter, Rigoberta tells her little sister’s story, and we learn that this sister joined the guerillas many years earlier, at the age of eight. This is contrary to Rigoberta’s response, which is to take a diplomatic approach to fighting for the rights of her people. These two young women embody the dilemma of whether to fight with weapons or take on the peaceful protests of such activists as Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Though she is a few years younger than Rigoberta, Rigoberta’s sister embraces the dark underbelly of the movement in which she and her other sister are involved. She bluntly reminds Rigoberta that there isn’t anything romantic to the lot they have been given in life.

Rigoberta holds on to her idealism despite these dire sentiments. She maintains the belief that her efforts and the efforts of the other companeros will ultimately end in something positive. Rigoberta’s sister, on the other hand, views life as “monstrous” and revolutionaries as coming into the world out of wretchedness and bitterness. This view contrasts sharply with the idea of birth as Rigoberta illustrates it in the opening chapter of I, Rigoberta Menchú, where children are born into lives of hard work but are celebrated by the community. Rigoberta’s sister’s words are a harsh reminder of the loss of community infrastructure the Quiché people have endured. For her, an identity of revolutionary has replaced that of the Quiché. Rigoberta resists this jadedness as she continues to identify with the way things used to be in her community and to hope for a reconstruction of traditional Quiché identity.