I, Rigoberta Menchú Study Guide

Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a member of the Maya-Quiché Indigenous community in Guatemala who has devoted her life to protesting the atrocities committed against Indigenous people in her native country. Through her activism in a variety of political groups from an early age, she has sought to educate poor Guatemalans about economic exploitation and resistance to violent repression. After several members of their family were violently killed by the Guatemalan army, Rigoberta’s siblings decided to join the guerrillas fighting the government, while she continued her campaigns of education and training for vulnerable communities in the countryside. After being forced into exile in Mexico, she published her autobiographical book I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), based on her interview with Elisabeth Burgos. This book had a huge international impact, bringing to light the brutal military violence that was oppressing Indian communities in Guatemala. As a result of this international attention, Rigoberta Menchú received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work as a social justice leader and an advocate for Indigenous rights in Latin America. She became the youngest person to ever receive this prize. Since then, she has received many prizes over the course of her lifetime for her role as a social justice activist. Although she has returned to Guatemala on various occasions, death threats have forced her into exile. She has continued to play an important role in Guatemalan politics, taking part in peace negotiations between the government and the guerrillas at the end of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1996. She has also taken on an international role as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, defending the rights of Indigenous peoples around the world. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray is a Venezuelan anthropologist, historian, and writer. She met Rigoberta Menchú in Paris in 1982 and interviewed her for a week, in order to collect the courageous young activist’s life story. Although she structured Rigoberta Menchú’s life narrative, she did not modify her interviewee’s words, thus allowing the final text to faithfully reflect Rigoberta Menchú’s self-expression.

Rigoberta Menchú’s narrative covers the period of the Guatemalan Civil War, which opposed the Guatemalan state and leftist guerrilla groups from 1960 to 1996. This war reflected the international dynamics of the Cold War, which was a conflict between the Capitalist Bloc led by the United States and the Communist Bloc led by the Soviet Union. In this context, the main international supporter of the Guatemalan government was the United States, whereas the leftist rebel groups received support from communist Cuba. In Guatemala, the guerrilla groups, who fought against unfair land distribution, were supported by the rural poor, of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage. Military dictators such as Generals Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García (1974–1978) and Romeo Lucas García (1978–1982)—whom Rigoberta Menchú mentions in her narrative—were responsible for ordering brutal violence against Indigenous peasants who protested the unequal distribution of land. Human rights abuses were widespread, as the army, police, and secret services took part in the torture, forced disappearance, and murder of over 200,000 people. The scale of these killings, which included the massacre of entire villages of unarmed civilians, is considered a genocide. Collectively, these events are known as the “Guatemalan Genocide,” “Maya Genocide” (given that most victims were of Maya origin), and the “Silent Holocaust.” A former Guatemalan military dictator, General Efraín Rios Montt, was indicted on the charge of genocide in 2013, but he died before the jury reached a verdict.

Rigoberta Menchú’s autobiographical narrative is considered a pillar of Latin American “testimonial literature.” In testimonial works, a first-person witness gives an account of an oppressive or exploitative situation in order to denounce injustice against a marginalized group. The first example of Latin American testimonial literature is Cuban writer Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966), which recounts the story of a fugitive slave during the Cuban War for Independence. Historical fiction can also be included in testimonial literature. For example, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) represents through symbols and imaginary events the centuries-long violence and oppression that has plagued many Latin American countries. Other works, such as Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s House of Spirits (1982) and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat (2000) examine dictatorships in Chile and the Dominican Republic. They serve as prominent examples of literature’s ability to give a vivid account of political violence in Latin America. In the setting of the United States, 18th- and 19th-century autobiographical slave narratives can be considered early forms of “testimonial literature.” For example, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1855) both bring to light the experiences of slaves in the U.S. In this way, they help tell the stories of marginalized groups, victims of racism and violent oppression, to the public.