Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans

by David Stoll

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813336947
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/28/2000
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

David Stoll teaches anthropology at Middlebury College. His other books include Is Latin America Turning Protestant? and Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.

What People are Saying About This

John Watanabe

More than an expose or refutation, Stoll's account presents an increasingly complex -- and I think ultimately sympathetic -- portrait of an exceptional, eloquent individual caught up in personal and historical tragedies doing her best to maintain her integrity. The strength of this book lies not in its refutation of Rigoberta Menchu's story but in its inquiry into what the instant worldwide appeal of her autobiography tells us about how we choose to understand recent Guatemalan history, Guatemalan society, and more generally, revolutionary struggle and authenticity in the voice of others.

Timothy Wickham-Crowley

The rule of all sociological studies should be a simple one: no icons. Not Karl Marx; not Max Weber (sigh); not Michel Foucault; not anyone. Rigoberta Menchu should not be an exception. This book is going to explode over Guatemalan and Latin American Studies.

Editorial Reviews

In the autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú, Mrs. Menchu, now 39, tells a wrenching tale of violence, destruction, misery and exploitation as moving as a Victor Hugo novel. Key details of that story, though, are untrue, according to [Stoll].

New York Times

Rigoberta Mench 's autobiography, I, Rigoberta Mench (LJ 11/1/84), told the story of a Guatemalan Indian family who suffered horrific oppression from the Guatemalan military and elite. That book and Mench 's subsequent activities propelled her into international prominence in the fight for the rights of the poor and oppressed. Mench became a symbol for the Left throughout the world and subsequently received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Based on ten years of research by Stoll, a somewhat controversial scholar and professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, this book questions the veracity of Mench 's autobiography, specifically aspects of her family background, her childhood, land questions, and violent acts against her family. This volume will be important for Stoll's analysis of how the academic and political Left functions and uses symbols to idealize victims of oppression. A landmark publication that most academic and large public libraries should acquire.--Mark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, UT

Library Journal

Mench<'u>'s tale of her odyssey from being orphaned by death squads to political exile propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Since the end of the civil war, her story has been questioned. Stoll (anthropology, Middlebury College) assembles the evidence and finds the story important in the fight for human rights and multiculturalism, but not the eyewitness account she claimed. He warns that focusing on images of victims can lead to more victims. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Stoll's campaign against myth, benevolent though he would wish it to be, is also a force for political demobilization and stasis.....Anthropologists and guerillas notwithstanding, life goes on.
— London Review of Books

Richard Gott

I, Rigoberta Menchu is not, alas, a true story....[as] David Stoll shows in his riveting and masterfully researched book....After Stoll's book, we have a pretty good idea of why [she] lied....much of the book is true -- and much more of it was at least plausible...
— The New Republic

Charles Lane

In the autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú, Mrs. Menchu, now 39, tells a wrenching tale of violence, destruction, misery and exploitation as moving as a Victor Hugo novel. Key details of that story, though, are untrue, according to [Stoll].

The New York Times

If not a phony, [Stoll] contends, [Menchu] is the author of an elaborate personal myth, one in which she embroidered liberally on some experiences, fabricated others and hid still others from public view....Stoll asserts that the fictions of Menchu's memoir are in fact threads of a bigger lie: that the rebel uprising of the late 1970s and early 1980s enjoyed wide support among the Mayan peasantry.
— The New York Times Book Review

Tim Golden

Stoll's important and painstaking work goes well beyond the particular's of Guatemala's monstrous history and Mench?'s honest suffering to address broader issues - the role of created moral authority, the value of armed revolt the validity of cross-cultural inquiry, the mysterious power of what he calls poetic truth.
— Washington Post

Joanne Omang

An anthropologist's (Middlebury College) critical re-examination of the phenomenon of Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan peasant awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. I, Rigoberta Mench&uactue;, her 1983 memoir, achieved international acclaim; it helped focus worldwide attention on the oppressive actions of the right-wing Guatemalan government and on the plight of the peasants, who were forced to join guerrilla movements to protect their lives and property. Both the book and Rigoberta became powerful symbols of the struggle of indigenous peoples against repressive anti-leftist regimes. While remaining sympathetic to Rigoberta's general message and to the plight of the Guatemalan peasants, Stoll's book attempts to unveil the manner in which the elevation of Menchú's book to the status of myth does violence to the complexities of historical reality. Using tesitmony of local residents and archival sources, in seeking to discover what has been filtered out of Rigoberta's heavily ideological account of recent Guatemalan history, Stoll focuses on what he reads as a discrepancy between the revolutionary fervor of the guerrillas and the voices of ordinary Guatemalan peasants. He characterizes the average peasant response to events as feeling "caught between two armies"—a far cry from the awakening into revolutionary consciousness described by Rigoberta in her book. Stoll employs possible inaccuracies within Rigoberta's text to destabilize the unity of her version of events. In particular, he questions her account on two historical points: "Was the guerrilla movement defeated in the early 1980s a popular struggle expressing the deepest aspirations of Rigoberta'speople? Was it an inevitable reaction to grinding oppression by people who felt they had no other choice?" Stoll's book is not an attempt to debunk Rigoberta's story, but to serve as a warning that elevating one version of history to cult status inevitably silences a multitude of others.

Kirkus Reviews

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