I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

by Rigoberta Menchú, Rigoberta Menchú, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (Editor)

Her story reflects the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America today. Rigoberta suffered gross injustice and hardship in her early life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military. She learned Spanish and turned to catechist work as an expression of political revolt as well as religious commitment. The anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, herself a Latin American woman, conducted a series of interviews with Rigoberta Menchu. The result is a book unique in contemporary literature which records the detail of everyday Indian life. Rigoberta’s gift for striking expression vividly conveys both the religious and superstitious beliefs of her community and her personal response to feminist and socialist ideas. Above all, these pages are illuminated by the enduring courage and passionate sense of justice of an extraordinary woman.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Biography, Indigenous, Biography Memoir, Politics

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Spanish pronunciation: [riɣoˈβerta menˈtʃu], born 9 January 1959) is an indigenous Guatemalan woman, of the K'iche' ethnic group. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala's indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She received the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and Prince of Asturias Award in 1998. She is the subject of the testimonial biography I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) and the author of the autobiographical work, Crossing Borders.

Menchú is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She has also become a figure in indigenous political parties and ran for President of Guatemala in 2007 and 2011.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading through some of the reviews written by others, I've found that David Stoll's indictment of Menchu for not adhering to the "pure facts" is still alive and well in the academy. There seems to be a tendency to ignore some very important factors that lead to the creation of this book, particularly the genre, testimony, and the nature of memory itself.

Testimony, or testimonio, is a literary genre that in many cases (although certainly not all) involves a testimoniante (one who testifies) and a letrado/a (academic). In the case of this testimony, Elizabeth Burgos-Debray recorded a series of interviews with Rigoberta while R.M. was in France seeking international solidarity and material help for her people who were being brutalized by Guatemala's government. Debray takes the liberty of ordering and editing Menchu's testimony in order to make it flow more easily, but there is certainly more to this work than Debray acknowledges.

Another important characteristic of what is called "exemplary testimony" is that the speaker (for indeed Menchu's spoken words are what are recorded, transcribed, and manipulated here) seeks a certain representativity for his/her group in order to call for solidarity and for aid. Stoll seems to require of a testimony that it be a historical document with correct dates, names, etc. His anthropological view (and I highlight the word "his," for many more anthropologists staunchly disagree with his point of view) seems to deny testimony some of its basic characteristics: political, and personal, urgency; desire for solidarity-building; urge to express one's own, very shocking, lived reality.

This last characteristic can be easily linked with the nature of memory. At the time in which Menchu was in Paris giving these interviews to Debray, she had just recently fled from Guatemala where she was under constant death threats and where she had witnessed countless death threats and institutional killings actually carried out. It is easy to understand, then, why details and dates and names might be less than crystal-clear in her account. But again, why must there be an expectation (unreasonable, in my estimation) of empirical facts in a document whose very process implies a temporal urgency (her fellow Quiches were still being brutally repressed and murdered) and a desire for self-fashioning, for narrating one's own experience. What could be more subjective that the lived experience of an individual?

I think the value of this testimony lies squarely on its speaker, an indigenous Guatemalan women, whose voice would never have been heard nor her people's story ever told had it not been for her relationship with Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. Guatemala's government held strict controls over their press, therefore the only way to build international solidarity and to gain aid for her country, Menchu had to go into self-imposed exile and tell her story.

This is a literary work, not a juridical document, and it should be treated as such. To see a thorough deconstruction of Stoll's indictment of Rigoberta Menchu, see Arturo Arias's Arturo Arias Taking their Word Taking their Word (2007).

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you go into this book without knowing what it is, there's sortof a plot twist halfway through that's one of the better ones I've read. It's a true story! I just didn't predict this woman's reaction to her life.

For the first half of the book, it's an oral history of a young peasant in Guatemala. She seems nice. Her life is desperate; she's poor and exploited by a racist government. She tells heartbreaking stories. Her baby brother was strapped to his mother's back as she worked on a finca (plantation). A cropdusting airplane flew over them all, as they do, scattering pesticide. The baby began to have trouble breathing. He shortly died. They were unable to bring him back to their mountain homeland, and when his body started to smell, they were forced to pay their entire family's entire season's wages for the right to bury him on the finca that murdered him.

That's sad, right? Makes you want to fight someone! And here comes the twist - and I don't think it's really intended as a twist, it's more or less described on the cover, but if you want the weird surprise I got then you should stop reading now. I'll give you a hint: Rigoberta Menchú ain't nothin' to fuck with.

What happens is that this sad teenager telling the story, around halfway through the book she's like, "So we decided to fight." All of a sudden she's describing how they built pit traps for soldiers. She practices throwing lime so that it'll go into their eyes and blind them. They organize. She - Rigoberta Menchú specifically - travels to other mountain communities, to teach them how to train their dogs to attack soldiers. They join a revolution.

And it turns out that Rigoberta Menchú is a hero of the Guatemalan Civil War, loosely between 1960 and 1996. The crucial events in this book, which turns out to be about her awakening as a revolutionary, take place in 1979. It reminds me a little of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk To Freedom, in that the author wants peace but is willing to use war to get there. Both books give pretty specific instructions on how to revolution. And both authors are winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Which, honestly, the Nobel dudes are basically just trolling dictators, aren't they? They're constantly giving awards to people who are not super devoted to peace. Lookin' at you too, Obama.)

I want to give what I guess is a trigger warning: you may choose to skip chapter 24, entitled "The torture and death of her little brother, burnt alive in front of members of his family and the community." (Different little brother.) The title is an accurate description of what happens. She describes everything that was done to him, and it's very bad. The idea was to intimidate the people. It doesn't work. Chapter 27 is about her mother, and it's also upsetting. This is the toughest stuff I've read since Survival in the Killing Fields from Cambodia.

I, Rigoberta Menchú was assigned reading for my incoming freshman college class, along with the mighty Nella Larsen. Liberal indoctrination: successful! And good choices, these are both legit great books. I've revisited them over the past few years and I remain impressed by the judgment of whoever made that decision.

Rigoberta Menchú ain't nothin' to fuck with and neither is this book.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a memoir of Rigoberta Menchu's childhood and later years in Guatemala as an Indian woman. According to her story, she grew up uneducated in a small community with very strong rules and traditions. Her people, the Indians, were in conflict with the Ladinos (specifically the wealthy) for many years. As a result, her father, mother, and several siblings died.

After reading this book, I found out that she had fabricated many important details in the story. On the very FIRST page, she tells us that she never went to school. On the contrary, Rigoberta seems to have attended a private school run by nuns, and got the equivalence of a middle school education. While a middle school education isn't stellar, it's better than nothing. Rigoberta learned to speak spanish at school, and not later on in her life as she claims. She lies about witnessing her older brother die (which she did not), having a younger brother starve to death on the coffee plantations (he's still alive and living in Guatemala), and the conflict between her father and the wealthy Ladinos over his land (in reality he was having a conflict with his in laws!). I understand that someone writing a memoir could forget some minor details, but this seems very intentional. In my opinion, she is biased against the Ladinos and the Guatemalan government, and isn't writing a bestseller just the best way to get back at them?

However, the fact that Rigoberta lied about her experiences is not the only reason that I gave this book one star. The book is written in a very dull way. It's amazing how Rigoberta makes even the most heartbreaking parts boring. Her parents die, her brothers die, she joins a rebel group, her life is threatened. All of these would make for a fascinating memoir that can't be put down. But Rigoberta interestinly shuns author's craft. The entire book is as if she is talking to you. No dialogue, suspense, etc. It's very unique, but still boring.

On a final note, Rigoberta won the Nobel Prize for this book. I'm not sure exactly how writing a sad book warrants a Nobel Prize. Perhaps it was awarded for bringing attention to the conflict in Guatemala? If so, then yes, that worked for me. I had never heard of any genocide in Guatemala prior to reading this book. But I, Rigoberta Menchu is so lie ridden that I am unsure what is the truth. The book introduces what happened in Guatemala to me. But to find the real truth, I'll just have to research it.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rigoberta Menchu has had an amazing journey, and this book is her testimony of the first twenty-five years of her life. She has since received the Nobel Peace Prize, started the country’s first indigenous political party and eventually she ran for president of Guatemala. She is a feminist and has dedicated her life to social justice work, while staying true to her K’iche’ roots and promoting indigenous solidarity amongst all the Mayan ethnic groups of Guatemala.

Guatemala, like most Central American countries, has had a very brutal history of non-stop repression. In her introductory essay, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray notes that Rigoberta “speaks for all the Indians of the American continent. The cultural discrimination she has suffered is something that all the continent’s Indians have been suffering ever since the Spanish conquest. She has survived the genocide of her family and community and is stubbornly determined to break the silence and to confront the systematic extermination of her people. She refuses to let us forget. Words are her only weapons” (pg. xi).

What I liked most about this book is reading the details of everyday life for poor indigenous peoples of Central America. What we find is a hard life, filled with hard work and little else. Rigoberta describes what life on the plantations is like, picking coffee and cotton. She goes into the trivial details of the life of a coffee picker.

“Coffee is picked from the branch, but sometimes when it was ripe and fell off the branch, we’d have to collect it up off the ground. It’s more difficult to pick up than pick from the branch. We have to pick the nearest beans very carefully - bean by bean - because if we break a branch we have to pay for it out of our wages. It’s worse when the coffee bushes are young. The branches are more valuable than on the old bushes. That’s the job of the overseer, watching how the workers pick the coffee and seeing if they damage the leaves. By the time I was picking 70 pounds of coffee, they paid me 35 centavos for the day” (pg. 35). Or on picking cotton; “The worst work is when it's the second ‘picking’. First ‘picking’ is when the flowers are nicely grouped together, but the second picking is when you have to pick between the branches the cotton which has been left behind the first time. That’s much harder work but the pay is the same (pg. 42).

She calls field work one long process of being robbed. We find out the common practice of landowners using faulty scales to weigh less coffee (and therefore pay less wages), or charging the pickers for everything they can (especially at the local cantinas…owned of course by the landowners).

Aside from the cruel life on the fincas and the injustice of getting paid so little for back-breaking work, she talks about the community breaking effects of seasonal field work, whereby families are separated for months at a time while working at separate plantations, and how they don’t even have time to communicate with other workers, since you are paid according to how fast / how much you pick. “Those days working in the finca are some of my earliest experiences and I remember it with enormous hatred. That hatred has stayed with me until today” (pg. 41).

Rigoberta recalls her coming-of-age ceremony, when the whole community gets to gether to help prepare her for womanhood. “They told me I would have many ambitions but I wouldn't have the opportunity to realize them. They said my life wouldn’t change, it would go on the same - work, poverty, suffering. The suffering is everywhere” (pg. 48). Despite having no real hopes and dreams for a better future, the indigenous communities take solace in their shared struggles and communal life. I really enjoyed reading about all the K’iche’ customs and lifeways. “We Must respect the one God, the heart of the sky, which is the sun” (pg. 58). We read how their prayers typically ask the earth for permission to plant crops and to give the community a good harvest. They even ask permission from the plants before harvesting the vegetables. There is a real spiritual and physical connection to Mother Earth. We learn about their cuisine and how they rarely eat animals…only on special occasions. I enjoyed learning how they build their homes, mostly out of cane stalks. “When we build a house, we make the roof from a sort of palm tree found near the foot of the mountains. The mature leaves last about two years and after that you have to start again. Between us - men, women and children - we could build a house in fifteen days. After the maize is harvested, people cut the stalks and use them for walls. But our house was made of sticks of cane: that lasts longer. The stocks are stuck in the ground and tied together with agave fibers. There are no nails in our houses. Even the roof props, the corners, or anything supporting the house, comes from trees” (pg. 47).

Marriage Ceremonies and Indigenous Secrets

It was fascinating to learn how on the day of a marriage, the bride and groom stand before the whole community and make a pledge to honor the Indian race. They ask their parents for continued help with “bringing their children up in Indian ways, remembering their traditions, and always remaining true to their race no matter how much trouble, sadness and hunger they endure. And the parents answer: ‘Generations and generations will pass but we will always be Indians. It is our duty as parents to keep our secrets safe generation after generation to prevent the ladinos learning anything about our ancestors’ ways” (pg. 68).

Then the village elders speak. “They refer back to the time of Columbus and say: ‘Our forefathers were dishonored by the White Man - sinners and murderers. We want to destroy the wicked lessons we were taught by them. If they hadn’t come, we would all be united and our children would not suffer. We would not have boundaries to our land.’ This is in part, recalling history and, in part, a call to awareness.” (pg. 67). She notes how this is a way for the elderly to unburden themselves. They talk about how they no longer grow cacao, since all the plantations are owned by ladinos. “It belongs to the White Man, to the rich. We can no longer sow tobacco. Before there was enough tobacco for all our people. Before we weren’t divided into communities and languages. Who is to blame for all this? The White Man who came to our country. We must not trust them, white men are all thieves. We must keep our secrets from them. We had no artificial medicines or pills before, our medicines were the plants” (pg. 69).

Before you start charging them with being racists against whites, you have to realize the history and everyday hard living brought upon by colonization. Having your friends and family members die from starvation, overworking, or flat out murder, might make you feel the same way.

I’m reminded of a story my mom told me a few years ago when she was in Guatemala in 2013. A group of well meaning ladino university students gathered supplies to help out poor indigenous communities on the altiplano. They were filming their journey. Unfortunately for them, they were literally ran out of town…fearing for their lives. They had to call for a police escort out of the community. And it wasn’t the criminal element that ran them out. It was the indigenous peoples themselves. There is very little trust of white people (including ladinos)...even well-meaning ones, in these communities, which have endured horrendous massacres in the decades prior.

Ladinos

Ladinos are those of mixed race (half white, half indigenous….or even fully white) ancestry, but who are fully assimilated into the dominant culture of Guatemala. They feel Guatemala is their land, much like white Americans think they are living on their land.

Elisabeth Burgos-Debray writes in the introductory essay, “The ladinos have adopted many features of the indigenous culture and those features have become what Georges Devereux calls the ‘ethnic unconscious’. The ladinos of Latin America make a point of exaggerating such features in order to set themselves apart from their original European culture: it is the only way they can proclaim their ethnic individuality. They too feel the need to be different and therefore have to differentiate themselves from the Europe that gave them their world-vision, their language, and their religion” (pg xvi).

I’m reminded of a passage in Ron Chernow’s book Titan, “a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany, with each claiming to be Rockerfeller’s ancestral land. ‘I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility,’ Rockefeller replied honestly. ‘I am satisfied with my good old American stock’” (pg. 3).

Rigoberta writes about first finding out there were poor ladinos. How that shocked her and made her realize that they are in similar situations…oppressed by the same economic (what else?) system. But although they are in a similar situation, there are some real differences between the two groups. The everyday life of indigenous peoples all over Central America are affected in many ways by it.

Rigoberta expounds. “Between these poor ladinos and Indians there is still that big barrier. No matter how bad their conditions are, they feel ladino, and being ladino is something important in itself: it’s not being an Indian. Even though the ladino is poor, even though he’s exploited as we are, he tries to be something better than an Indian. In the market, for example, no ladino would steal from another ladino as he would from an Indian. A ladino would even insult a lady but an Indian could never do that. The ladino has many ways of making his voice heard - if he goes to a lawyer, he doesn’t need an intermediary. He has more channels of access. And so that’s why the poor ladino rejects the Indian. If an Indian goes near a ladino, the ladino will leave his seat rather than be with the Indian. We feel this rejection deeply. What does the ladino have that we don’t? I compared myself with them. Is it that some parts of his body are different? And the system feeds this situation. It separates the Indian from the ladino” (pg. 167-168).

After a few years in the resistance (still only in her early twenties), she realizes that “my bitter experiences, my affection for my companero, for my people, had made it difficult for me to accept certain things. I identified certain of my attitudes - very rigid ones. Discrimination had made me isolate myself completely from the world of our companeros ladinos(pg. 168).

That’s some heavy stuff right there. It’s a history that’s not as far back as we may think it is. Rigoberta remembers hearing stories from her grandfather…he must have been born in the 1880s or 90s. “That grandfather used to tell us many bits of his life: he said that years ago, he’d lived when there was slavery. He was the eldest of his brothers and sisters and in those days, the eldest of a family was forced to work as a slave for white men. My grandfather used to curse the Spaniards. The Spaniards were at the root of our plight. They began taking so many things out of our lands, they began stealing from us.” (pg. 189).

Speaking of the Spaniards, Rigoberta drops a gem on ‘em when she tells us of “Tecun Uman, the K’iche’ hero who is said to have fought the Spanish and then been killed by them. His birthday is commemorated as something which represented the struggle of those times. But for us the struggle still goes on today, and our suffering more than ever. We don’t want it said that all that happened in the past, but that it exists today, and so our parents don’t let us celebrate it. We know this is our reality even though the ladinos tell it as if it were history” (pg. 204). That’s a mic drop.

Land theft occurring in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s

Ah yes, it really all comes down to this, doesn't it? Rigoberta comes to the conclusion that “the root of our problems lay in the ownership of the land. All our country’s riches are in the hands of the few” (pg. 166). Now I’ve heard a short video of Jordan Peterson saying something to the effect of, wealth will always accumulate in the hands of the few. Just think of that…an excuse, or rebuttal, to the horrific repression of indigenous peoples all over Central America. Like; “naw, that’s just the natural way of things. Don’t trip.” This wealth was stolen. So was that wealth. Get it or don’t.

Many don’t realize that land theft of many indigenous communities didn’t just occur hundreds of years ago, but oftentimes, it occurred only decades ago. We actually get to read about how this land theft occurred…on-the-ground. Rigoberta describes how in the western departments of Guatemala, first the land surveyors arrived and began measuring the land. Then the ‘landowner’ arrived asking them to sign documents they couldn't read. Then the ‘landowner’ arrived with hired men telling them to leave…or else. Then the hired men came and literally threw all their belongings down the slopes, kicking them out of their homes. All the pots and pans (all made by hand out of clay…hard work) are smashed. Crops are pulled out. And they are forced out…completely landless. And compared to what followed, after the indigenous communities were resisting the eviction from their own lands, that was relatively peaceful!

Rigoberta’s father was the ‘chief’ of the community, and he kept going from village to village, finding out that this was happening all over Guatemala (Europeans, Canadians, Americans need their morning cup of joe! … all that land was designated to be coffee plantations) at the time, so indigenous groups started organizing all over. The state repression got worse, and local movements all over started coalescing into an armed guerilla resistance. Hence the horrific 1970s and 1980s.

I enjoyed learning about the K’iche’ relationship to their lands. She discusses how before their communal harvest, they would have a ceremony to thank the earth and the Sun for the reapings. During this ceremony they would ask permission from the plants to cut their crop. You’ve heard of the saying, ‘you are what you eat’. Well Rigoberta believes Indians are made out of maize, since this is what they mostly eat. She believes they are one with all living things, including plants. “Maize is the center of everything for us. It is our culture” (pg. 54).

More pertinent to this discussion, she discusses how the community chooses how best to plant their seeds. “When sowing time comes, the community meets to discuss how to share out the land - whether each one will have his own plot or if they will work collectively. Everyone joins the discussion. In my village, for example, we said it was up to all of us if we wanted our own plot or not. But we also decided to keep a common piece of land, shared by the whole community, so that if anyone was ill or injured, they would have food to eat” (pg. 55).

We learn about a ritual whereby an infant’s hands are tied together for the first few days after birth. “The tying of the hands at birth also symbolizes that no-one should accumulate things the rest of the community does not have and he must know how to share, to have open hands” (pg. 15). She goes on further to note, “In our community we are all equal. We all have to help one another and share the little we have between us. There is no superior and inferior. But we realized that in Guatemala there was something superior and something inferior and that we were the inferior” (pg. 123). Her comments about her community reminds me of the ‘traditional Indian egalitarianism’ from up north (see my Tecumseh and the Prophet review). The American ways of individual land ownership and accumulation of wealth weren’t so familiar to many indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.

Eventually, most of the villagers are given an individual plot of land each…allowed to stay there and cultivate the land for the landowner. As a survival tactic, the villagers eschewed their individual plots of land and went back to communal living. This was because it was much easier for someone to get ‘disappeared’ if no one was around to hear it happen. But in their communal villages, soldiers were not able to sneak up on them without everybody finding out. “Even though the agrarian reform had allocated us our own plots, we decided to put them all together in spite of the sub-divisions - the ones they imposed on us” (pg. 158).

The repression really kicked into high gear, in 1978, when Lucas Garcia came to power. This is when the massacre of Keckchi Indians in Panzos (near Coban) happened. Other massacres occurred at the villages of Chajul, Cotzal and Nebaj. “It all came out in the newspapers. But nobody paid much attention. So the story died. Nobody was interested in the death of all those peasants” (pg. 160). The men of their villages had to go into hiding, because they were getting imprisoned, tortured and murdered at random, charged with being ‘Cuban or Nicaraguan sympathizers’. Rigoberta was with a group who were able to capture a soldier alive (they had only one gun with no ammo). “We asked him: ‘And what are you defending? Where are these communists? The soldier didn’t even know what communists were” (pg. 148).

Strategies of Communal Resistance and Defense

Rigoberta speaks at length about the various ways to contribute to the struggle. She worked as an organizer in the resistance movement for years, going from community to community trying to unify the various Mayan ethnic groups. She realized that it was important to speak a common language in order to properly communicate, so they had to use the language of the conquerors…Spanish. But more importantly, she was bringing awareness to other isolated communities that they were not alone in their suffering. She taught them defensive tactics that she learned from her community, which in turn learned it from the ancestors in their fight against the Spanish. She advocated everyone to have weapons at the ready…the peasant weapons, like sticks, stones, machetes. Escape routes should be planned and practiced by the whole community. Lookouts were to be placed around the village on rotating shifts. Everyone was to be trained and made aware of the signals.

...Continued in the Comments Section

[Francesca Helm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had been looking for a book related to Guatemala as am travelling there and this seemed like an obvious one but got totally put off after reading various reviews. After talking to people here in Guatemala, who say despite any inaccuracies (lies critics say) and despite her subsequent political career which is also somewhat controversial here - her book really brought world attention to the Mayan cause and is an incredibly important book to read, I bought it. Though clearly not 'great literature' it's incredibly sad but interesting, a fascinating insight into life of Mayan people and the Repression which continued 'Civil War'. She brings up a great deal of issues which are still relevant today - discrimination, poverty, land rights, language, literacy, human rights abuses - just look at what's happening now with the mining companies who are throwing people off land where their families have lived for centuries, burning their homes because they are "illegally occupying land which belongs to the mining companies" - watch this video about Canadian mining companies in Guatemala!
I found it interesting what she said about the importance of learning Spanish to communicate with the other Mayan communities (there are 22 languages in Guatemala) and to be able to understand what was being done to them - again an important issue today as these govrnments and companies get away with murder by not translating, getting people to sign documents they cannot read and understand!!

[Suzanne moodhe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know all about the controversy - did she write the book? Didn't she? The point is that whether or not all of these things happened in particular to this one woman, Rigoberta Menchu, but whether or not they happened to not only her but women that she knew. I believe that this is a collection of events that happened all around her - and having lived in Guatemala for a short period and seen the reconstruction efforts of the Mayan people after the war that was waged on them during the 80's with Jose Effrain Rios Monte, I believe them all to be true.

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a raw and powerful memoir of life as a member of the impoverished and exploited class. In 1983, a young indigenous Guatemalan woman narrated her story to an anthropologist. She tells of growing up in an isolated mountain community, so isolated that none spoke Spanish or another indigenous language. Illiterate, shoeless, often hungry, she tells of working from dawn to dusk to eke out a small crop, of working on coffee and cotton plantations under slave conditions, and of the gradual radicalization of her entire family who became leaders in the peasant uprising that threw the country into a civil war. She speaks beautifully of her people’s culture, of the love of her family and support in the community, and she speaks with deep sorrow of the arrest, torture and death of parents and a sibling, the degradation she experienced whenever she interacted with non-Indians in Guatemala and the powerlessness felt by most of Guatemala’s indigenous poor. This was a moving insight into a life and a world view so different than mine. Rigoberta Menchu has become an international activist for human rights, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and has continued to be involved in Guatemalan politics.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entonces, ante esto, pues, yo me sentía muy inútil y cobarde de no poder hacer nada por mi madre, únicamente cuidar a mi hermanito. Y así es cuando a mí me nació la conciencia, pues. Aunque a mi madre no le gustaba mucho de que yo empezara a trabajar, a ganar mi dinero pero yo lo hacía y lo pedía más que todo para ayudarla a ella.

[Max · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book with an incredibly uncreative title is a falsified memoir by Rigoberta Menchu. The book describes a poor family who was forced to work and work until they got fired and then the Guatemalan army came in and destroyed their lives. First, Rigo's brother got killed and tortured in a completely unsituational way, and then her father got killed. After that, her mother was caught and raped. Then, she had to run away to America. This book at first made me feel pity for the narrator but eventually, I realized that this was too gruesome to be true. If horror movies are fiction, how can this crap of a book be, where Rigoberta remembered every detail of the tortures her family members suffered without actually witnessing them. This book was also contradicted by a journalist and Rigoberta admitted some parts were lies and agreed to change it. The moment she even admitted this made me sick as not only did she dishonor her family members so harshly, but the $19.95 I spent on this book could've bought me some pretty damn delicious sandwiches.
There was absolutely NOTHING to learn from this book after you know it was a bunch of lies. This book was just a completely exaggerated bias belonging to a fat woman who wrote bullsh*t to rip off my money. This book had its exploitation at imagery for a moment, but the fact that she (the author) won the Nobel Peace Prize for writing this garbage sickens me. It disgraces everyone who has rightfully earned it so far.

[Mir · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this in Spanish for Spanish class. I may have been unduly hostile towards it because I knew ahead of time that it was not actually Menchu's autobiography.

[Lada Moskalets · Rating 3 out of 5]

Книжка жінки з народу майя, яка брала участь в Громадянській війні у Гватемалі. Вона написла її в двадцять три роки і отримала за неї Нобелівську премію миру. Насправді книжку уклали на основі інтерв'ю з Рігобертою.
В мене немає однозначної думки. Рігоберта це людина, яка увійшла і міцно адаптувалася до світу герільяс і компаньєрос і, освоївши їхню мову (не лише іспанську, але й терміни і концепти), пише про своє село. Вона одною ногою в традиції, але вже знає про "травму", "ідентичність", "клас", "мачизм" і намагається описувати через ці слова свій досвід. Мені це муляло око, але, зрештою, так краще розумієш, що майя це не лише селянки в кольорових сукенках, але й люди, які досить активно включилися в боротьбу за свої землі, в тому числі фізичну.
Про релігію і Церкву страшенно цікаво, бо з одного боку Церква допомагає їм здобувати освіту, вчити мову і просто виживати, але водночас є знаряддям експлуатації.
Є пару зовсім тяжких розділів, де описані тортури над її братом і матір'ю, та поміж тим інформація про побут, їжу (якщо коротко - тортільяс з чілі і корінці, а на велике свято курка), роботу на фермах і звичаї. І, попри всі жахіття, авторка оптимістична і сповнена віри в перемогу, як і належить такій молодій людині.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profoundly beautiful and charming, Menchú’s narrative never fails to get me in a really weird mood. Coming from dirt poor ladino farmers on my mother’s side, I never fail to hear the resonating echo of state abuse and land expropriation that underwrites so much of what I’ve heard of my grandmother’s childhood. While I genuinely, genuinely detest the phrase “brought tears to my eyes” (because, in my humble opinion, if it applies to fucking “Infinite Jest” or Knausgaard’s “Struggle” your outlook on the world is mad warped) this book never fails to get me. Menchú deserves every bit of praise and then some. Furthermore, upon a second reading, the fact that some transnational feminist curriculums just wholly overlook this text is a damn travesty.

[Florence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book recounts the life of a remarkable young peasant woman who endeavoured through exteme hardships, to make a political commitment to bring change to the lives of the Guatemalan people. Her father, an activist, her hard working mother and a young brother were all tortured & murdered by the military. The descriptions of injustices suffered leave the reader forever scarred.
Rigoberta learned Spanish so she would be able to tell her story. (one apparently common to most of the 23 Indian communities of Guatemala.)

[MaHfEr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book but traumatized me for life. I have no faith in humanity anymore.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reentering my reading era :0 This is a really insightful book into the exploitation in Guatemala and really all of Latin America, and lowkey there was kind of a plot twist in a way that I really liked.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book a long time ago, when I was in Berkeley in the 1980s, it was kinda de rigeur. Just picked it up again from the bathroom reading pile in the house in Vancouver where I'm renting a room for the year (my new roomie is really active in native radical politics). I hadn't given much thought to the book since I heard the news that Menchu fictionalized certain parts of it, wanted to see if I still found it powerful. I did. Not so much for the politics, which even when I read it the first time seemed propagandistic in places, but for the evocativeness of indio life in the mountains. It made me think a lot about Bourdieu's "habitus," the way Menchu described the various customs and rituals, particularly around marriage. It's an interesting truth-making practice she was involved in, creating a collective voice and porsopographical portrait.

[Ashley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is about an Indian women living in Guatemala. This book was ridiculously sad and later I learned that some of the events that took place didn't happen and that she over exaggerated which made me feel so betrayed because she's a liar and I don't like that. This book is an autobiography about her life and the hardships she had to overcome.

[Aurélien Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the remarkable autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú, an activist those fight became a whole symbol when it comes to human rights (she received the Nobel Prize for Peace back in 1992).

In 1982, while in exile from her native country (Guatemala) she was welcomed by the ethnologist Elisabeth Burgos in her home in Paris, who wanted to interview her. This book is the result of such meetings, and where Rigoberta Menchú tells her story, a story which make for a powerful read, painful at times, yet always full of hope and strength, echoing that of Indian people all across the South American continent.

She describes their way of life, their traditions, their rites and customs. However, this is not about anthropology. This is, indeed and above all, political dynamite, exploding at the face of those ignoring the problems faced by indigenous people across Latin America.

Countries ethnically divided and still impacted by colonial mentalities, we discover the horrors of discriminations, the scorn Indians are victims of, exploited, forced into long working hours in 'fincas' and for a meagre salary. Children work as hard as adults, get sick easily (she lost a brother to malnutrition) and, poorly educated if at all, have no escape but working as prostitute or maids for wealthy, racist, families.

There is hope, though. Illiterate, not even speaking Spanish, many dared then to fight back and campaign. She talks about their struggles, from organising protests to guerrilla warfare, and those actions would spread across the country, leading to a brutal repression, and, even, massacres (her parents and a bother were executed), a repression which ultimately saw her fleeing into exile.

This is a powerful book, enraging, at times very difficult to read because of the horrors described, but which constitute an invaluable testimony about the fate of Indian people, as told by a very courageous woman indeed.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchu - An Indian Woman In Guatemala is a combination autobiography and description of the Maya guerrilla movement that mobilized to combat the military government during the period of 1970-1996.

The book begins with detailed descriptions of a Quiché Maya upbringing, discussing the lives of men and women living in small rural altiplano villages. Gradually, as Ladino landowners employ the army to steal the land farmed by the Maya, and force them to pick coffee and cotton along the Pacific coast of Guatemala, Rigoberta and her family become politicized.

She originally works with CUC (Comité de Unidad Campesina) and eventually aligns herself with more militant factions, especially one named after her father, Vicente, who was murdered by the army. Her mother and one of her brothers were kidnapped by the Army and tortured to death.

This book was originally dictated to a Venezuelan writer named Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. It does a good job of describing the lives of the Highland Maya and the reason why the resistance to the army and landowners cmae about and grew.

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad I finally finished this! I was supposed to in high school before I went to Guatemala, and then I started again when I lived in Texas. In the past I only made it as far as reading about Rigoberta's childhood, not her politicized adulthood. I'd like to read the book she wrote later in her own words. This one is hard to give a 'takeaway' for because it's an intentional piece of propaganda filtered through multiple editorial and translation lenses during the civil war. I still learned a lot about the indigenous land movement and how people were/are living with so little in the altiplano.

I wish I'd read this before the trip in high school. I had a good convo with François about that trip and how it feels to reflect on it now, with more context.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had read this 20 years ago because I worked with an indigenous group in Colombia. Menchu's testimony tells a story that is rampant throughout the world, not just Guatemala, of corrupt elites exploiting poor indigenous people for their labor and their land and eventually mobilizing a sadistic military against them when they resist. It's a horrific history. What I really appreciated about Menchu's memoir was her articulation of how her political consciousness and critical thinking developed and also how her community learned to organize themselves to defend themselves. For me, personally, it was invaluable to understand the background of the distrust of teachers and schools, and I wish I had read this during teacher training.

I understand that there is a scandal around this testimony as the anthropologist Stoll found discrepancies in Menchu's history. I haven't read the NY Times article and probably should, but I don't think that discrepancies in the narrative diminish the value of Menchu's memoir. For me, the value was less in what happened when but how she thought about things and how her community worked and operated as a people. It's hard also not to simplify the controversy into elite white male professor at Middlebury denounces poor indigenous woman who survived a genocide and to wonder what Stoll's motives were exactly. As a woman, I know how little value is given to women's voices, and so I view the controversy with a lot of skepticism - not so much about what really happened because we all know that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable (memory is a tricky beast especially when layered with trauma) but more so for the purpose. Was Stoll being envious or petty? Or was he compassionate? I don't know.

This is an important book in understanding the history and corruption of Central and South America, and it's an invaluable book in understanding the complex dynamics of racism, colonialism, religion, indigenous rights, labor rights and culture.

[theresa]

incredible.

read for my Latin American texts and contexts class

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed and thoughtful oral history of the life of one young revolutionary.

Cw for colonization, graphic violence and murder, rape

[Sebastian Beltran · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most amazing narratives/ auto biographies i’ve read! i appreciate the intimate history of her family, the life working on farms/ plantations, and her road of revolutionary self discovery. would love to teach this book

[Ayesha Tahir · Rating 5 out of 5]

"AH-" my response to almost every page..

[Terri Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I found the story interesting, this is supposed to be Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography and my standard for autobiography is that it should be TRUE and HONEST yet this is nothing but a pack of lies and that taints the story. I had to read this for a graduate school seminar and fortunately the university allowed us to write papers about the controversy rather than accept the book as factual.

A few years after the book came out, David Stoll (he has his doctorate from Stanford University) was planning to write a book about Rigoberta's book since he had a deep interest in Guatemalan history. He was shocked to find that Rigoberta had lied through the whole book. Some examples:

(1) She says in many places that her father would not let her go to school and that she had never been to school when in fact she had been sent to two different Catholic schools from the time she was 5 years old to around 15 on scholarship.

(2) She claimed, at age 23 when this was written, to have resisted learning Spanish until 20. The truth is, she had been taught to read, write, and speak Spanish fluently from the time she was 5.

(3) She claimed a brother who turned out to not even exist died of starvation.

(4) Chapter after chapter covered day to day experiences she claimed to have had at home and working hard and seeing terrible things on the fincas where families went for farming jobs. In fact, she was away at boarding school and never worked in the fincas or saw what went on at home.

(5) She claimed to have watched a female friend die while they worked in the fields after poison was sprayed. She was away at boarding school when she claimed this happened and it never did happen.

(6) She claimed she and her parents were forced to watch her brother be burned to death. This never happened.

(7) She claimed another brother died of starvation when she was a kid but researcher Dr. David Stoll and also the New York Times found that brother alive and well decades after she said he died.

(8) She detailed how the ladinos and soldiers battled them for their land. Lies. Hundreds of family members, friends, and neighbors said it was no such thing, that her father was embroiled in a decades-long feud with his in-laws over the land.

These are only a few of the lies. Instead of owning up to it, Menchu alternately refused to answer even family, friends, and neighbors who asked why she lied, said these were her memories and she was entitled to them (she was 23 when this was written and she knew they were lies and not memories she told them), said it was the experience of people in Guatemala (while masquerading as lies she said were factual thing that happened to her personally), and even said were not her words (despite the verification of 18 hours of audio tapes in her voice of her telling the lies) and finally, that it was racist to call her on the lies.

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I once heard Ms Menchu speak at a conference. She was always smiling. How could she smile when she has lived a horrendous life?! So, I wanted to read her story.

This was written in 1982 (give or take a year) during the Guatemala's Civil War. This is her story about living and working in the antiplano (highlands) of Guatemala. It was a tough life. She had no formal schooling and she worked at such a young age. She had no childhood. She worked in the finca's (large estates growing cotton and coffee) and later as a maid. She saw the inhumanity and discrimination by the ladinos (of Spanish blood) against the Indians. Dogs were treated better than the Indians. She and her family became activists and revolutionaries. She saw her younger brother tortured and murdered by the army; everyone in the village had to witness it or they would be next. Her father was killed in the fire at the Spanish Embassy. Her mother was kidnapped, raped, tortured, and left to rot. No wonder she has a hatred for the ladinos, and especially the army.

There were sections of her story that I found disturbing, particularly the torture descriptions. How can the human body survive that torture!?

Her upbringing taught her that she will have a tough life and that's the way it will be. At her 10 year celebration when she becomes a women, her parents told her that she "would have many ambitions but I wouldn't have the opportunity to realize them. They said my wouldn't change, it would go on the same -- work, poverty and suffering." How sad. Where's the hope?

She was taught that schools are bad because they take away and destroy the Mayan culture. The students at schools could not wear their heritage costumes, but uniforms. Also, the students are taught that the Spanish conquest was victorious, but "we knew in practice it was just the opposite." This is because the Mayan culture, ceremonies, dress, and languages still exist today.

"...we don't like killing. There is no violence in the Indian community." She blames the ladinos, especially the Spanish conquistadors for all the killing and violence. True, there is discrimination and senseless killing by the ladinos towards the Indians. However, she neglects to mention that her ancestors before the conquistadors had wars amongst themselves.

Very moving story. No wonder she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

UPDATE: I did a little internet research on the Guatemala civil wars. Apparently, there is some critique on Ms Menchu's story. Some of her stories are not true. Dr Stoll provided an expose when he took a trip to Guatemala. http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/m...

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

one of those books that are sad and leaves nightmares. The book written by Rigoberta Menchu tells the world of the cruelty that went in Guatemala as the "Silent Holocaust", a genocide upon the Indians in Guatemala. The conflict all start off when the new president took land from the rich to give to the poor as a civil rights movement, but a US Fruit company disliked the idea and took the US gov. that communist activity was going on in Guatemala, therefore triggered the genocide...

The peasants (indians) are mostly illiterate because of poverty. Therefore, most people cannot communicate to people from other villages. This linguistic barrier suppresses each of the peasant communities from joining together. This barrier restrains rebellions. The government takes advantage of the peasant’s lack of abilities to read and scammed the peasants of their land. There is a big gap between the poor group and the rich group. Upon from the suppression, comes a ladino group who are a mixture. They think they are better than Indians and look down upon Indians. In addition there are groups of Indians that forgotten and abandoned their traditions. People have different ideas and thoughts. This makes people think differently and act differently and this is what separates everyone into different groups and divisions. This is also how conflict occurs.

In a society, everyone is responsible for their actions. All actions come with consequences and aftermaths. The decision of one will affect many others.It is selfish to just think about oneself when everyone else is sacrificing their lives for the community. Each individual have their own roles in the struggle and cannot just do whatever they want. Rigoberta is in charge of her role and she must follow her role until the end. The sacrifices of individuals in society will only strengthen the ones that are left to fight, to never give up and fight for what they believe in. In a society, there are people who betray others for their own egotistical purposes. Those people then are irresponsible, self-centered, and hated. There are always disagreements in society and that makes people argue and fight.

Rigobeta mentions fighting back, for her people and her culture. The people from the elections, the goverment would give the community false hopes in order to get the people to vote for him. The governments need the power of the people yet they also suppress the people so the people won’t hold too much power, but she wants EVERYONE TO FIGHT BACK...

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1983 Elisabeth Burgos met the 23-year-old Rigoberta Menchu and spent a week interviewing her and made that into this book, which is partly autobiography and partly 'testimonial' speaking for the experience of the whole Indian community of Guatemala [[60% of the popul. is pure Mayan, tho divided into 3 language groups and many smaller subgroups:]. [Book transl. into English by Ann Wright.:]

Horrifying how the mountain peasants are exploited by plantation owners on the coasts, living in subhuman conditions and being paid almost nothing. Makes you sick. Menchu [who of course won the Nobel peace prize in 1992:] does a good job of showing in detail how the exploitation can take place - with collusion from the gov't, the police, and the army - and partly because most Indians receive no formal schooling and therefore don't speak Spanish and are not literate.
It also makes you sick how attempts to organize unions and protest for better working conditions and so on are so brutally repressed. Systematic torture and murder of whole villages. There are plenty of places around the world with similar situations.
This book shows graphically exactly how this oppression works in everyday life.
Unfortunately, I pretty much have to conclude that human nature seems to make oppressors the victors, in Guatemala as elsewhere.

original title: Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu en asi me nacio la conciencia.

[Ling Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about Rigoberta, her family and her community. They were going through a harsh, grief and tragic time. They are Indians that lives high up in a mountain with no fertile lands. Oneday the landowners decided to get back their lands because the Indians started to have crops. Rigoberta and her community thought of traps that will prevent the people from coming into their lands. During this period, a lot of people stuffer from torture and death, including Rigoberta's mom, dad and brothers because they were part of the community.
As this continues, the government found out that Rigoberta was a leader of this, so she was chase after by the soldiers...