Rigoberta Menchú

Now a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. Menchú suffered gross injustice and hardship in her early life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military. She learned Spanish and turned to catechistic work as an expression of political revolt as well as religious commitment. Menchú vividly conveys the traditional beliefs of her community and her personal response to feminist and socialist ideas. Above all, these pages are illuminated by the enduring courage and passionate sense of justice of an extraordinary woman.

Rigoberta Menchú is a living legend, a young woman who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was "the story of all poor Guatemalans.” By turning herself into an everywoman, she became a powerful symbol for 500 years of indigenous resistance to colonialism. Her testimony,I, Rigoberta Menchú, denounced atrocities by the Guatemalan army and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. But her story was not the eyewitness account that she claimed. In this hotly debated book, key points of which have been corroborated by theNew York Times, David Stoll compares a cult text with local testimony from Rigoberta Menchú’s hometown. His reconstruction of her story goes to the heart of debates over political correctness and identity politics and provides a dramatic illustration of the rebirth of the sacred in the postmodern academy.This expanded edition includes a new foreword from Elizabeth Burgos, the editor ofI, Rigoberta Menchú, as well as a new afterword from Stoll, who discusses Rigoberta Menchú’s recent bid for the Guatemalan presidency and addresses the many controversies and debates that have arisen since the book was first published.

In 1984, Nobel Peace Prize winner & indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchu published her autobiographical account of life in Guatemala under a military dictatorship to great acclaim. Here, Greg Grandin investigates the historical context and political realities that underlie Menchu's past and the ongoing debate surrounding it. GREG GRANDIN is the author of Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. A professor of history at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow.

Testimonial narrative is considered to be both a constant in Latin American literature, as well as one of the most prominent features of the post-boom writing of the 1980s and 1990s; women have successfully assimilated this form and currently dominate the testimonial genre in Latin America. The essays in this volume provide an orientation to the woman-centered view of this genre by inquiring into the critical and theoretical debate on the subject as well as analyzing specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American women's testimonial texts. Woman as Witness also includes selections from two testimonial works by Argentine women to advance the creation of a canon of Latin American feminist testimonial.