Rigoberta Menchú, an Indian Woman from Guatemala

Abstract

The keywords of Latin American history such as colonialism, exploitation, violence, and political or social instability contributed to the creation of a new genre in the Latin American literature: testimonio (testimony). Biography of a Runaway Slave by Miguel Barnet (1968) is the first testimonial narrative based on interviews with Esteban Montejo, a 103-year-old man who had lived in Cuba both as a slave and a fugitive slave, and who fought in the island’s War of Independence against Spain. The resulting book did not fit easily into any existing category of literature and came to be known as testimonio. Elzbieta Sklodowska (1992) clarifies that testimonio emerged as an alternative narrative form in Latin America for marginalized and oppressed communities in the wake of the success of the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s. Since then, the Indigenous peoples, peasants, and oppressed people or groups of people “felt more enabled to speak for themselves.” This type of narrative does have an underlying political intent to inform people from outside the community, or outside the country, about the oppressed people’s conditions of life and their suffering. In most cases, people who are witnesses to violent, oppressive situations are trying purposely to communicate with others hoping for a change, be it social, political, or both. One such person is Rigoberta Menchú, a Mayan woman from Guatemala, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her human rights activism against the oppression in her country. In 1984, Rigoberta Menchú wrote her famous testimony, I, Rigoberta Menchú. It is a first-person account of the brutality of the Guatemalan government and the ruling class toward Indigenous Guatemalans. This narrative brought her fame, praise, but also controversy. What is testimony and why is her story important? I will examine these questions through the personal testimony and discourse analysis of I, Rigoberta Menchú with the hope that her story will never be forgotten, but remembered and understood in the context of the Indigenous other theory of suffering of Indigenous people in Guatemala.