Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans

In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, David Stoll finally publishes his completed study examining the phenomenon of Rigoberta Mench, the Mayan human rights activist whose 1983 testimonio Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la conciencia has generated much debate within the North American academy. Stoll, an American anthropologist whose fieldwork in the Guatemalan Highlands during the 1980s and early 1990s was in the same area as that recounted in I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984, English translation), offers an alternative explanation of the political and social struggle by indigenous Guatemalans in the 1970s and early 1980s to that provided by Menchú. His questioning of Menchú's veracity and her self-positioning as a representative of the Guatemalan ‘people’ underpins two other major claims: that the guerilla movement itself was to blame for the escalation of state terror in Guatemala in the early 1980s and that U.S.-based scholars and solidarity activists have been too uncritical in their acceptance of Menchú and the revolutionary movement's claims to represent ‘all poor Guatemalans’

Indigenous · Political science · Politics · History · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

• To End with All These Evils

  Open Access•Greg Grandin•Latin American Perspectives•1997

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