I would like to address three themes that link Rigoberta Menchú's narrative [in I, Rigoberta Menchú] to the politics of ethnicity and cultural pluralism in modern Mesoamerica: (1) a contextual appreciation of the larger picture of the cultural and political transformation of the Maya communities of Mexico and Guatemala, of which Rigoberta Menchú's book is a key but far from most important part; (2) the role of epic literature in this transformation, an issue that places Rigoberta Menchú's narrative at center stage; and finally (3) the truth status of events that typically underwrite epic narrative in general and Maya story-telling in particular. I shall address each of these topics briefly and will stress throughout that the tempest about the truth, lies, or propaganda that may inform Rigoberta Menchú's testimony amounts to a moot point. What does matter is that she and her editor, Elizabeth Burgos, have created a modern epic narrative that has served as a catalyst for raising the collective consciousness of the Maya people and for provoking a lively debate within the Maya intellectual community about what constitutes Maya identity and history. Western scholars' fulminations about its truth and authenticity are but a sideshow.

A recent journalistic commentary has highlighted the import of the Menchú/Stoll controversy against the backdrop of the February 25, 1999, release of the Historical Clarification Commission's report, Guatemala, Memory of Silence. This editorial comment notes that the Commission's document generally corroborates virtually all of Menchú's generic claims and also testifies to the magnitude of the controversy about who “owns” Maya history.

While the report is a definitive statement about what happened during the war, it is not expected to end the struggle to determine who will write Guatemala's history: “Whoever controls the windows to the past will strongly influence the future. This war is being fought on several fronts. On one battleground, the veracity of a political icon's life [Menchú] has come under fire” (Latinamerican Press, March 8, 1999).

This issue matters a great deal to the greater Maya community. Prior to I, Rigoberta Menchú, there was no charter text that spoke to modern Maya identity as a shared identity. Even the famous Popol Vuh, the great Quiché sacred narrative dating from the mid-sixteenth century—now adopted as a kind of generic Maya Bible, a charter text, by some Maya intellectuals and many lay people in the greater Native American community—indulges in fiercely partisan politics. It exalts Quiché moral and political authority over all others, including the Quiché's erstwhile chief enemies, the Cakchiquels (also Maya). Now all the Maya have I, Rigoberta Menchú, complete with its own political biases. It may indeed be a partisan propaganda document, as Stoll alleges; it may be a conflation of the stories of many into the voice of one, as even she, Rigoberta, now acknowledges; and it clearly does not incorporate the point of view of all modern Maya people. Nevertheless, it stands as the most important Maya literary document of the modern era. In my effort to appreciate its singular stature, I prefer to approach it not as testimony or as history or as autobiography or as biased political propaganda. It should be evaluated in the domain where it belongs: epic literature.

RIGOBERTA'S TEXT AS AN ACCOUNT OF A FORMATIVE ERA

Like virtually all epic texts, I, Rigoberta Menchú records events from an era of trouble and conflict—as experienced by one or several individuals—that transforms public sensibilities into a vivid awareness that “we're in this together,” so to speak. This book belongs to a series of events in the past two decades that mark as causes and effects the emergence of an extraordinary pan-Maya cultural, intellectual, and political consciousness in our time.

This larger context goes well beyond the particulars of Guatemala's civil war to include both Mexico and Central America. Key events include the following: Mexico's conscious tilt, in the 1980s, toward political and economic policies—dubbed neoliberalism—that are hostile to the interests of the rural poor; the end of the cold war (1989–1991); the controversial Columbus Quincentenary and the (not unrelated) 1992 award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchú; the beginning of the Maya Zapatista insurrection and the inaugural day of NAFTA, both on January 1, 1994; the Zapatista-sponsored National Indigenous Forum (January 1996); the formal (if not actual) end of civil conflict in Guatemala (December 1996); and the Zapatista-sponsored national referendum on indigenous rights (March 1999), which yielded a nonbinding 95 percent victory for indigenous rights among the 3 million Mexicans who participated. Although I am not arguing for a chain of causally linked events, all of the above have produced a fundamental transformation in the way many Maya communities in Mexico and Guatemala view themselves today—not only as villagers loyal to local customs and local saints but also as members of a larger pan-Maya community that has its own agenda, a common past, and its own nationally specific programs for interacting with the Guatemalan and Mexican states.

RIGOBERTA'S TEXT AS EPIC NARRATIVE

Rigoberta Menchú's testimony follows a typical rhetorical device of epic narrative: the return of the hero. Her text reproduces this familiar pattern: the hero leaves the comforts of youth and home; the hero becomes aware of a critical problem afflicting his or her people, usually political oppression; the hero, persecuted, is forced into exile to obtain wisdom and perspective; he or she returns home again, in life or in death, apotheosized as a quasi-god, determined to change the social order. Menchú's highly personal narrative of her youth, her witnessing of atrocities and family tragedy, her politicization in Guatemala, and her experiences as a refugee in Chiapas, where she lived as a member of the household of Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas, all follow this classic heroic plot. Bishop Ruiz served as an important mentor to Rigoberta in exile, just as he has been a steadfast ally of the Maya Zapatista movement in its quest for social justice. Rigoberta has returned to Chiapas on at least one occasion to offer her support for the Maya Zapatista cause. More important, also following another classic heroic motif, she returned to Guatemala as an international celebrity widely mentioned as a plausible candidate for President of the Republic.

What does all of this mean? It means that Rigoberta and her book are local and international icons in the debate about Indian identity and indigenous ethnic politics in the Americas. There are undoubtedly better and more authentic works of indigenous scholarship and artistic creativity, but no work reaches the popular stature and emotional appeal of this work. It must be understood in these terms. I have already stated that Menchú's text accomplishes some of the same ideological purposes for the Maya present as the Popol Vuh provides for the Maya past. As a self-conscious effort to address the condition of “all poor Guatemalans,” there is no modern text that compares with it in magnitude or visibility or true epic proportions.

It is worth noting that many of our best-known epic and sacred texts in the West have taken shape and become canonic in circumstances not unlike those of Guatemala in the past two decades. The most ancient case is the Torah and, specifically, Genesis, which makes a highly biased case for a unified Hebrew nation under a monotheistic god, against a myriad of difficulties both internal and external. Internal troubles range from sibling rivalry to tribal conflict for power, while external threats emanate from state-level societies—Babylon and Egypt—both of which are stronger, initially, than the aspiring Hebrew nation. By the end of the book Babylon is destroyed and Egypt is co-opted under Joseph's stewardship. Jacob, after a “struggle with God,” is eventually renamed “Israel,” sire of the 12 tribes of Israel. A “new era” is in place.

The great epics of the West follow a similar pattern of struggle for sovereignty and ethnic integrity against formidable external adversaries. In the cases of the Chanson de Roland and the Cantar del Mío Cid, the enemy is the expanding Islamic empire. In both of these texts, the heroes do battle with alleged Muslim infidels to defend the Holy Roman Empire (in the case of Roland) or Christian Spain (in the case of El Cid). In both cases the heroes die as martyrs, and in both cases their “cause,” Christian Europe, prevails. The point is that heroic narratives are born in times of threat, peril, and great sacrifice in the effort to defend nations and peoples from annihilation. These narratives also vest the biography and body of the hero with the person of the nation or people that he or she represents.

Extending this model to Rigoberta Menchú, we see that her own life history becomes heroic not only in the construction of the story line but also in the theme of violent sacrifice of virtually her entire family at the hands of the purported enemy—the white Guatemalan state and its allies. Initial acknowledgment of Rigoberta Menchú as a hero came neither from her fellow Maya nor from ladino Guatemalans; it came from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Now, however, she is the national celebrity par excellence. Love her or hate her, Guatemalans cannot ignore her. Nor can we.

TRUTH IN HEROIC NARRATIVE

All of which calls to mind my concluding question: Does historical truth in epic narrative really matter? Probably not. Genesis is a composition attributed to many authors, one of whom labored heroically in the fourth or fifth century A.D. to edit many versions to achieve a plausible story line, trying to get rid of discrepancies and contradictions regarding the “truth” of events. He succeeded for the most part, but Genesis as we know it still has many irreconcilable contradictions: Was humanity created once or twice? Did Abraham give Sarah (both his sister and his wife) to Pharaoh as a concubine or as a platonic friend? In either case, how can this act be rendered as honorable? The text of Genesis leaves these and a number of other questions completely open to our interpretation and imagination.

Similarly, the stories of Roland and El Cid both deal with a murky and shifting frontier zone between Christian Europe and the Islamic empire on the Iberian Peninsula. Many scholars regard the story of Roland in Iberia as one of many comparable minor skirmishes that came to be remembered as emblematic of a difficult time in French history. The truth of the circumstances of the martyrdom of Roland matters far less than its power as a distillation of an era in the persona of one individual.

I know from personally examining original manuscripts of hundreds of ballad text transcriptions from which Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal synthesized the definitive version of the Cantar del Mío Cid in the 1930s that the story of this great hero and his deeds, his life and times, has hundreds of variants, many of them radically at variance with one another regarding “what happened.” Don Ramón, an eminent scholar and artist, cut and pasted from hundreds of alternatives to assemble a good story that is now accepted as the “canonic text.” Rigoberta Menchú has engaged in the first generation of such selective editing of a key period in modern Maya history. She has told a good and compelling story of epic proportions that has riveted the attention of the world. Furthermore, the generic facts corroborate her story.

In evaluating the “truth status” of this text, it is easy to forget that it flows from Maya sensibilities and storytelling conventions. This is surely so even though Elizabeth Burgos and other ideologically motivated Westerners were involved in the production and promotion of the book. The Maya cultural and cognitive universe from which this story flows follows a number of what Rigoberta herself calls “our secrets.” Critics have called this romantic hype. I think not.

One should note her adamant use, again and again, of “we” as opposed to “I” in phrasing her testimony. She states the plural, collective voice again in a recent interview that appears in the Guatemalan Scholars' Network (January 30, 1999, my translation):

Q: They condemn you for pretending to have life experiences that are not your own.

A: I can't oblige them to understand these things. All of this, which for me is the history of my own life, is also the history of my own community. I am not a pitiful solitary bird who came from the wilderness, the child of only a mother and a father who are alone in the world. I am the product of a community, and not just the Guatemalan community.

In the Chiapas variant of this world that I know well, the earth itself speaks via its minions, the earthlords; animals still speak to one another and to humans; causality flows not only from human agency but from co-essences that live outside the body; dead historical figures return to help the living; even Spanish is relegated to the primitive lingua franca of all people in antiquity. I believe that Rigoberta Menchú's narrative comes in large part from a Maya cultural universe. When the dust settles from the current controversy, I think the work will assume its rightful place as a major charter document for the Maya cultural and political renaissance that is occurring in our time.