Of Straw Men and Stereotypes

Why Guatemalan Rocks Don't Talk

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4501059
AutoresNorma Stoltz Chinchilla (California State University, Long Beach, autor de correspondencia)
Año1999
Volumen26
Número6
Páginas29-37
Fecha de publicación1999-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLatin American Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0094-582X • E-ISSN: 1552-678X
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0094582x9902600603
OpenAlexW2009298616
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5

Long before David Stoll's book appeared and the New York Times journalist Larry Rohter (1998) gleefully proclaimed it a definitive expose of Guatemala's only Nobel Prize winner since Miguel Angel Asturias (and the only indigenous female, let alone Guatemalan, to become an international icon), there were articles and interviews purporting to summarize Stoll's argument and his motives for advancing it. From exposure to a few of these I formed my first impressions of his project and was willing to give his motives for devoting ten years of his life to it the benefit of the doubt. I seriously questioned the timing of a book that would most certainly tarnish the reputation of one of the few objects of international pride Guatemalans have had in the past few decades and worried that its appearance would make an already difficult process of reconciliation more so. But I was willing to concede that Stoll's inquiry, however uncomfortable and disagreeable, might lead to a useful reexamination of the idealizations that inevitably emerge during a war. I was interested in honest discussions of a revolutionary strategy that, in retrospect, had underestimated the power of the enemy and carried such a high cost in human lives, particularly those of indigenous Guatemalans. I knew from experience that complexities, nuances, and contradictions are typically overlooked or go unmentioned in the course of mobilizing support for one or another side in a war or in efforts to stop widespread human rights violations. If, I reasoned, all Stoll intended to do was to show that Rigoberta's autobiography might have been partly a composite or an oversimplified account, crafted in a historical context that required a certain amount of clandestinity and dissimulation to survive, that could be useful information for those who studied and used oral histories. Again, if it was an account partially shaped by the international audience with whom she was trying to communicate-the

Agronomy · Biology · Economics · Political science · Straw · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Psychology