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This book is about a living legend, a young Guatemalan orphaned by government death squads who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was "the story of all poor Guatemalans.” Published in the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú, her words brought the Guatemalan army’s atrocities to world attention and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Five years later, as her country’s civil war ended and truth commissions prepared their reports, the Nobel laureate seemed to repudiate the life story that made her famous. "That is not my book,” she said, accusing its editor, Elisabeth Burgos, of distorting her testimony.Why the disclaimer? One reason was the anthropologist interviewing other violence survivors in her home town. In Rigoberta Menchú and The Story of All Poor Guatemalans, David Stoll uses their recollections and archival sources to establish a different portrait of the laureate’s village and the violence that destroyed it. Like the imagery surrounding Ché Guevara, Rigoberta’s 1982 story served the ideological needs of the urban left and kept alive the grand old vision of Latin American revolution. It shaped the assumptions of foreign human rights activists and the new multicultural orthodoxy in North American universities. But it was not the eyewitness account it purported to be, and enshrining it as the voice of the voiceless caricatured the complex feelings of Guatemalan Indians toward the guerrillas who claimed to represent them. At a time when Rigoberta’s people were desperate to stop the fighting, her story became a way to mobilize foreign support for a defeated insurgency.By comparing a cult text with local testimony, Stoll raises troubling questions about the rebirth of the sacred in postmodern academe. Far from being innocent or moral, he argues, organizing scholarship around simplistic images of victimhood can be used to rationalize the creation of more victims. In challenging the accuracy of a widely-hailed account of Third World oppression, this book goes to the heart of contemporary debates over political correctness and identity politics.
| Preface | ||
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Chronology | ||
| 1 | The Story of All Poor Guatemalans | 1 |
| Pt. 1 | Vicente Menchu and His Village | |
| 2 | Uspantan as an Agricultural Frontier | 15 |
| 3 | The Struggle for Chimel | 29 |
| Pt. 2 | Popular Revolutionary War | |
| 4 | Revolutionary Justice Comes to Uspantan | 43 |
| 5 | The Death of Petrocinio | 63 |
| 6 | The Massacre at the Spanish Embassy | 71 |
| 7 | Vicente Menchu and the Committee for Campesino Unity | 89 |
| 8 | Vicente Menchu and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor | 107 |
| 9 | The Death of Juana Tum and the Destruction of Chimel | 125 |
| 10 | The Death Squads in Uspantan | 141 |
| Pt. 3 | Vicente's Daughter and the Reinvention of Chimel | |
| 11 | Where Was Rigoberta? | 159 |
| 12 | Rigoberta Joins the Revolutionary Movement | 167 |
| 13 | The Construction of I, Rigoberta Menchu | 177 |
| 14 | Rigoberta's Secret | 189 |
| Pt. 4 | The Laureate Goes Home | |
| 15 | The Campaign for the Nobel | 203 |
| 16 | The Lonely Life of a Nobel Laureate | 219 |
| 17 | Rigoberta and Redemption | 231 |
| 18 | The New Chimel | 249 |
| 19 | Rigoberta Leaves the Guerrilla Movement | 265 |
| 20 | Epitaph for an Eyewitness Account | 273 |
| Notes | 285 | |
| Bibliography | 311 | |
| Index | 323 |
Anonymous
Posted April 13, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Overview
This book is about a living legend, a young Guatemalan orphaned by government death squads who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was "the story of all poor Guatemalans.” Published in the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú, her words brought the Guatemalan army’s atrocities to world attention and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Five years later, as her country’s civil war ended and truth commissions prepared their reports, the Nobel laureate seemed to repudiate...