SOURCE: Treacy, Mary Jane. “Rigoberta Menchú: The Art of Rebellion.” In A Dream of Light and Shadow, edited by Marjorie Agosín, pp. 207–220, 322–23. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Treacy explores the politicization of Menchú and her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú.]

I'd like to stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people. The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.

—Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

Rigoberta Menchú might not approve of this effort to put together a brief biography for this volume. It is not that the winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize does not have an important or compelling life story to tell. To the contrary, this young woman from the highlands of Guatemala has organized for Indian rights and social justice throughout the turbulent 1970s and 1980s and has seen her own family members die, one by one, as victims of the poverty and repression that characterize the recent history of her country. In part because she is a Quiché Indian and her people value community over individuality, and perhaps also due to the terrible tragedies that she has witnessed and described in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984), Rigoberta chooses to present herself as a person whose life story is important because it encapsulates the experiences of her people.

Because she does not care to focus on her own life as unique, Rigoberta does not provide the same kind of biographical information that we have come to expect in conventional autobiography. We learn that she was born in 1959, in a hamlet near San Miguel de Uspantán in the northwest, primarily Indian, province of El Quiché. She had five older siblings and three younger. As a young girl, she was immersed in the Mayan culture of her ancestors through the Quiché language and teachings of village elders, who urged her to respect mother earth, to cultivate the land, and to care for its animals. Like the women before her, Rigoberta was trained to grind corn and make the dough for tortillas, to grow the beans that are the staple diet of her people, and to weave the clothing that mark her identity as a member of one of twenty-two Indian groups in Guatemala today.

It is unlikely that the child Rigoberta paid much attention to the nation whose citizenship she bears. She did not speak or understand Spanish, did not go to school, and therefore did not learn to read or write in any language, and she did not socialize with any non-Indian children in her racially segregated society. But she did learn how difficult it was for Indians to survive in a country where a mestizo minority (called Ladinos in Guatemala) control all national institutions and create their wealth from Indian labor. She and her family spent approximately four months of every year in their highland home growing subsistence crops of corn and beans, and the rest of the year—together or apart—working in coastal coffee, cotton, and sugar plantations. Rigoberta worked beside her mother in the fields from a very early age, either gathering crops or tending to her younger siblings, and she got her first paying job picking coffee when she was only eight years old. Plantation life was extremely hard for young and old alike: Indians were transported there in covered trucks, stacked up in barracks with few sanitary conditions, forced to work long hours for very little pay, and treated with contempt by their Ladino overseers and landowners.

It was on the plantations that Rigoberta came into contact with Indians from other groups and realized that they suffered the same exploitation. It was there, too, that one older brother died of pesticide poisoning, and she watched as another brother died of malnutrition. And it was there that the plantation owner's henchmen exacted work under threat of violence. As a teenager, Rigoberta began to see that she was destined to the same bestial work, poverty, and suffering as her mother, and, although lacking a clear direction, she began to get angry and look for ways to escape what seemed like an ominous fate. A short and humiliating period as a maid in Guatemala City convinced Rigoberta that Ladino women exploited Indians in the home just as Ladino men did in the fields. The girl was living out the cruel statistics of her country: 85 percent of the population survive in poverty, some 60 percent in utter misery; 63 percent are illiterate, and female Indians have a life expectancy of only forty-seven years, compared to forty-nine for their male counterparts.

Yet there were avenues to possible social change. During Rigoberta's childhood, a national religious movement, Acción Católica, was sending catechists to work with the Indians. Originally a conservative group whose goal was to assure doctrinal orthodoxy and social assimilation of the Indian, Acción Católica sent many clergy and lay workers who genuinely sympathized with the economic plight of the Indians and initiated religious study among them that had potential for raising consciousness about social conditions. By bringing people together for prayer, Acción Católica established a means of organizing. Its Bible study, perhaps intended to lull Indian participants into resignation to the status quo, in fact allowed the faithful to relate religious teachings—not surprisingly, David and Goliath was a favorite—to their Guatemalan reality.¹ Rigoberta's mother and father became catechists. This gave them an opportunity to travel to other villages in the region, not only bringing prayer but also the conversations necessary to fight for a modern-day exodus of their people.

Rigoberta tells us that she too was a catechist since she was “a girl,” and that her current political activities are those of a revolutionary Christian. She tells us that Indians are profoundly religious, seeing the sacred in all aspects of life. Accordingly, she does not make a distinction between the religious aspect of her activism and the political nature of her faith:

Well, my work is just like being a catechist, except that I'm one who walks on the Earth, not one who thinks that the Kingdom of God only comes after death. Through all my experiences, through everything I'd seen, through so much pain and suffering, I learned what the role of a Christian in the struggle is, and what the role of a Christian on this Earth is. We all came to important conclusions by studying the Bible. All our compañeros did. We discovered that the Bible has been used as a way of making us accept our situation, and not to bring enlightenment to the poor. The work of revolutionary Christians is above all to condemn and denounce the injustices committed against the people.²

Unfortunately, Rigoberta and her compañeros found much to denounce. Since the Spanish conquest, Guatemala has been a country of profound social inequalities supported and maintained by weak and often corrupt governments. In the twentieth century the power of the United Fruit Company as the country's largest land-owner, the development of a national oligarchy whose wealth was based on export crops, and the use of the military to support such a social system has only aggravated existing injustices. When 1960s and 1970s saw a rise in guerrilla insurgency, the state unleashed the terror of counterinsurgency campaigns—informal death squads, militarization of the countryside, massacres of entire towns, and scorched earth policies—that made mere survival a central concern for most grass roots organizers and their sympathizers. It is said that Guatemala gave Spanish America the infamous and frightening verb “to be disappeared,” coined after so many were taken away from their home, never to be seen again. Stories of Guatemala's repression, tortures, and cruelty abound, and the Indians, feared to be and to harbor guerrilla fighters, received the brunt of this violence. Rigoberta's brother was disappeared, tortured, and then burned alive with other unfortunates in front of the townsfolk who were forced to watch the army's display of power. Later, her father was killed during a protest in the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. Later still, her mother was raped, tortured, left to die, and refused burial as an example to others who aspired to social change.

Indians had few options during these dangerous decades. Some became informers, others guerrilla fighters, and still others joined political organizations. As did her father before his death, Rigoberta started to work with the Committee for Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina, or CUC), founded in 1978 to protect peasants from the appropriation of their land and exploitation of their labor. Still strong today, the CUC fights for just wages, decent working conditions, and fair prices for crops. It also demands the right to organize peasants, to keep Indian lands, and to maintain cultural identity and dignity for Indian peoples as well as the right to live and be free from repression.

Even Rigoberta's nonviolent work for peasant and Indian rights made her a target for disappearance and political assassination. One day soldiers spotted her in the street, and she had a narrow escape by hiding in a local church. Realizing that she was in danger and that her presence also would endanger others, she managed to find temporary quarters working, yet again as a servant, in a convent until her compañeros could get her on a plane to Mexico. She left in 1981. Rigoberta now lives in exile and has become well known worldwide for her activist work on behalf of Indian people and all of Guatemala's poor. She has been able, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, to return to Guatemala on short visits, and her writings are now available in her country. But Guatemala's passion is not over, and she still cannot go home.

U.S. readers first heard of Rigoberta Menchú when her life story was translated and published in English by the London-based Verso Press in 1984. By this time, Latin Americanists and literary scholars had become interested in what seemed to be a new genre of literature, the testimonio, or witnessing act, which gave voice to the silenced majority of people in Central and South America. Like several other politicized women in the region, Menchú recounted her experiences to an intellectual, the Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, who in turn structured the oral material and fashioned it into what appears to be a first-person account.³ Critics have been examining just how the intellectual, who does not speak in the testimonial text itself, really stands behind the scene asking the questions, ordering the narration, and giving the tone or political direction that best suits her or his interests. Indeed, there is an irony that the very act of “giving voice” (that is, providing a vehicle for the disenfranchised to reach a public forum) to the marginalized may also involve appropriation of their lives. For instance, the first editions of I, Rigoberta Menchú, which were published simultaneously in Spanish and French in 1983, present Elizabeth Burgos as the author and view Rigoberta as the object of her study. Examples such as this ask First World readers, and perhaps Third World elites as well, to consider how we look at the marginalized whose stories we read and how we represent these “others” in our thinking, literature, and art.

We are perhaps most comfortable viewing the experiences of Third World peoples as exotic and quite different from ourselves. We tend to see through an idealized “tourist” lens that provides a Rigoberta colorfully dressed in Indian garb, a vision that appears on the cover of every edition of her work and is described in almost all the newspaper and magazine articles written about her. We also focus on her suffering, which permits us to feel compassion while entertaining a certain frisson of horror at the violence detailed in this testimonial story. Responses such as these do not point only to the individual reader's appropriation of the life story for our own interests but also to the existence of hegemonic modes of seeing or reading that, unchecked, reinscribe colonialism and the social dominance inherent in it. The Third World comes to our awareness for our pleasure or need. Thus, even as we read about Rigoberta Menchú, we may very well be seeing only what is important to us. Rigoberta, the twenty-three-year-old Quiché woman, becomes a mirror reflecting our own dreams or nightmares.

Some North Americans look to Rigoberta's story as means to transform the way we understand the world around us. They claim that we usually do not hear the opinions of those who hold little or no social power. We tend to exclude all but a few exceptional women, poor, racial, and ethnic minorities and other outcasts from our thinking; if they can write, they are not published, if they are published, they are not widely read. As a result, we see only the views and debates of those with some claim to power. Although seemingly self-evident, this notion has far-reaching implications: it suggests that what we have come to think of as knowledge is not truth but rather an interpretation constructed in the context of hierarchical social relations and passed on as objective fact. And if we begin to interrogate knowledge, we come to ask how it was developed over time, who participated in its development and who was excluded from this process, and what these silent observers might have added or questioned.

Rigoberta, who is triply marginalized as a Central American, an Indian, and a woman, not only has different opinions than do most Ladinos or North Americans on such pertinent issues as the place of the Indian in modern society, but also reveals a distinct framework for understanding the world that challenges our own. Her concepts of what it means to be an individual, a woman, or what social justice entails do not fit easily into the paradigms we generally hold. Thus, she is in a position to reorient and to enrich our ways of thinking, or at least this is the hope of those who support the current multicultural movement to introduce ethnic, racial, and international perspectives in our U.S.-European world view.

Of course, new paradigms are also disturbing and not everyone supports opening up traditional Western thought to include the perspectives of the non-elite. Indeed, when Dinesh D'Souza singled out Rigoberta Menchú as the epitome of all that is wrong in contemporary American education, the Quiché woman—most probably unbeknown to her—became a rallying cry of both the Right and the Left in the “culture wars” of the 1980s and early 1990s. Whereas research on Rigoberta and her text now proliferates on our campuses, D'Souza sees the inclusion of I, Rigoberta Menchú into university curricula as the symbol of a multiculturalism that not only removes any notion of hierarchy in cultural values but also legitimizes radical feminist and Marxist views as it establishes a sort of victim studies to appease minority interests. His third chapter, “Travels with Rigoberta: Multiculturalism at Stanford,” rails at academics' idealization of the Third World and use of what he would consider to be second-rate materials to sustain a simplistic critique of Western culture:

Rigoberta's victim status may be unfortunate for her personal happiness, but is indispensable for her academic reputation. Rigoberta is a modern Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of North American white male cruelty; thus her life story becomes an explicit indictment of the historical role of the West and Western institutions.⁴

D'Souza and other conservative thinkers are correct to suspect that inclusion of Rigoberta and other Third World voices into the curricula can do more than just give equal time to “others.” If culture is a site where power relations are maintained or enhanced, then a policy of decentering a Western world view reduces the importance of traditional works and perhaps calls the values they embody into question. Latin American testimonial literature, narrated as it is by the disenfranchised, often calls for profound social change if not outright revolution. Rigoberta's testimony can be used, and maybe even is intended to be used, to encourage political action against the Guatemalan government, to gain support for progressive parties and organizations, and to bring to light the plight of the Indian in a discriminatory society. It is undoubtedly a political text. Moreover, its focus on social injustice and organization of mass resistance may well spill over to advance a left-wing or progressive agenda in other countries as well.

For this reason, some view Rigoberta Menchú as a political threat. Certainly the Guatemalan military saw her as a “subversive,” intent upon undermining the authority of the state. Her critics in the United States also perceive Rigoberta as a revolutionary and an ally of the guerrillas. Both groups are partially correct, for those who wish to see Rigoberta only as a symbol of a harmonious multiculturalism fail to acknowledge that she is calling for social revolution, often but not exclusively in Marxist terms. Her CUC analyzes Guatemala's situation in terms of economic exploitation by foreign capital and native elites and has as its primary agenda the development of a popular revolutionary war. Rigoberta considers the masses to be the only group capable of social change and therefore has dedicated her life to the politicization of the people. Indeed, her testimony is not the autobiography that the English title might suggest but rather a story of her own ideological transformation, which is stated explicitly in the Spanish title of her book: My Name Is Rigoberta Menchú and This Is the Way My Consciousness Was Born.⁵ Its purpose is to inform as well as guide our interpretation of contemporary Guatemalan social conditions.

Rigoberta's Christianity leads her to value sacrifice, even of one's own life, for the benefit of others and the eventual triumph of her political ideals. But she does not speak only of martyrdom. Bible study has also led Rigoberta to espouse the possibility of a just war against an oppressor and violence against the state is one of the strategies to be used in this war. Even as a girl Rigoberta took part in her village's defenses against possible army intrusion. She learned to lay traps for and to ambush soldiers; to throw lime, chili, salt, and hot water into their faces; and to throw stones with deadly intent. Later, as an adult, Rigoberta does not make a clear distinction between herself and other members of a nonmilitary organization like the CUC and the guerrillas: all are the friends/comrades who are referred to as compañeros. The only difference seems to be geographical: the guerrillas are the compañeros in the mountains, the others work elsewhere. She mentions that her mother had contact with the guerrilla and that two of her sisters took up arms. A conversation with one of her guerrilla sisters that Rigoberta reports shows how both women employ the language of love and sacrifice to articulate their political commitments. The sister tells Rigoberta: “I'm happy. Don't worry about me. Even if I suffer hunger, pain and long marches in the mountains. I'm doing it with love and I'm doing it for you.”⁶ The two then hear mass and take communion. Catholicism, Indian values, and guerrilla warfare are inextricably blended together to form one multifaceted movement for social justice. Thus Rigoberta shows no signs of horror at the existence of a guerrilla movement or its left-wing philosophies; she has merely decided to work elsewhere toward the same goals.

If news and magazine accounts are any indication, North American supporters of Rigoberta are rather squeamish about her links to guerrillas and try to distance her from them by emphasizing her work for human rights. Although her personal suffering during the repression as well as her public condemnation of atrocities helped focus world outrage at Guatemala's genocidal practices, attempts to ignore or downplay her revolutionary social agenda only serve to make Rigoberta more palatable to North American liberal audiences. They also force her into a U.S. political framework that divides reform from revolution and politicians from insurgents. Indeed, this is one area where Rigoberta may ask us to rethink our paradigms and to imagine what work for social justice and human rights in a Guatemalan context may actually entail. She may remind us that Guatemala during the repression of the 1970s and 1980s was a world “so evil, so bloodthirsty that the only road open is our struggle, the just war.”⁷

If reading Rigoberta asks us to examine our cultural values and political assumptions, it also poses questions about how one can live in multicultural societies. Guatemala has a Ladino minority with power and a majority Indian population, divided into twenty-two groups that are separated by geography, language, and history. Rigoberta tells us some of the customs and traditions of her village that pass on a Quiché ethnicity to a younger generation. After the birth of a child, for instance, parents make a public commitment to teach their newborn to honor the ancestors, to maintain a traditional way of life, and to keep the secrets of the Indian people. Children learn that the Spaniards dishonored their ancestors and that Ladinos are not to be trusted. Rigoberta's grandfather used to tell her that “the caxlans [Ladinos] are thieves. Have nothing to do with them. You keep all our ancestors' things,”⁸ and her father refused to send her to school in order to keep her from Ladino influences. What Rigoberta does not tell us, however, is that traditional Indian societies were breaking down during the time of her childhood. Conscription of Indian men into the army, public schools, as well as modern media such as the radio brought more contact with Ladino society, while proselytizing evangelicals and the Acción Católica directly undercut the authority of village elders and institutions. As victims of racist oppression and genocidal attacks, many Indians sought to counter a possible ethnic eradication with the development of a pan-Mayan identity.⁹ The descriptions of Quiché customs that Rigoberta gives in her testimony are, therefore, more than an offering of ethnographic curios surrounding the primary tale of ideological development. They are one half of a dialogue with the dominant Ladino culture which asserts resistance to it, either showing how the Quiché hold on to ancient rites as a mark of identity or create new “traditions” to develop a Mayan sense of self worth for the present day.

It appears that Rigoberta grew up in an ethnically “pure” environment. She learned the traditions and wore the Indian clothing of her region, refusing makeup and other coquetries characteristic of the Ladino girl. But as soon as she left her highland village to work on the plantations, she came into contact with other Indians and soon recognized that the cultural isolation of each group actually fragmented and disempowered them all. She therefore set out to learn several Indian languages as well as the language of power in Guatemala, the one language that consistently had been used against the Indian, Spanish. Now Rigoberta turned the “master's” language against him; with it she could communicate with others within Guatemala and also bring her country's plight to world public opinion. Moreover, while working, presumably in Spanish, with the Committee for Peasant Unity, Rigoberta began to realize that there were poor Ladinos as well as rich ones and that these poor were as exploited as the Indians. She began to see how unanalyzed racism divided and weakened them all: poor Ladinos still found dignity in their contempt for the Indian, Indians rejected other Indians who lost their traditions or who interacted with Ladinos, even Rigoberta recognized the “thorn in her own heart” that led her to dismiss all Ladinos as unable to understand or work with her. Rigoberta decided to keep her commitment to the CUC and to continue contact with Ladino peasants and sympathetic intellectuals. In so doing, she broke with the isolationist tradition of her people as well as the more recent Mayan separatism.

Rigoberta Menchú did not lose her Indian heritage, nor did she become, as some say, a mouthpiece for left-wing class analysis. She remains as fervent in her support of Mayan identity and Indian rights as in her hope for a Christian social revolution. But she is a skilled organizer who knows that progressive Guatemalans need to work in coalitions to build a new society and a savvy politician who uses foreign intellectuals and presses to help this cause. So although her interlocutor and editor Elizabeth Burgos could fall into reveries of a Venezuelan childhood as she watched Rigoberta make tortillas in her Paris home, we can bet that Rigoberta knew exactly why she was in France telling her life story to a woman with excellent international connections.

Academics and intellectuals have often demanded that Rigoberta represent something: either an idealized indigenist past or absolute resistance to the West (she points to anthropologists and sociologists as the most common offenders). But she rejects these interpretations of her role as much as she dismisses the notion that Indians cannot and should not participate in Western culture. To the contrary, in her latest work Rigoberta asserts:

This separatist agenda is not very intelligent and does very little to help indigenous peoples. I, for instance, use the fax quite a bit, I like the fax. Do they expect us to protest by mule? The Mayans discovered the concept of zero, so we have the right to advance in the sciences, to understand the world in all its complexity, to have opinions on things besides our own ethnic problem.¹⁰

Thus, she sees no contradiction between maintenance of an Indian identity and modernization of Indian life. Rigoberta envisions a Guatemala that is committed to human development as well as to human rights, where Ladinos and Indians can work together, and where Indians can maintain their heritages as they become involved with world affairs. She will wear her Quiché clothing and send her fax.

On October 16, 1992, the Norwegian Noble Committee recognized Rigoberta's work for social justice and ethnic reconciliation by awarding her that year's Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, Rigoberta urged her public to “fight for a better world, without poverty, without racism, with peace.”¹¹ At the beginning of a new decade and five hundred years after the European conquest of America, it was fitting to honor an Indian woman who wishes to stand for the existence and well-being of the indigenous peoples who lost their lands and autonomy to European settlers and who urges us all to transcend our differences in order to work together toward a common goal of social justice and peace. What her activism, her testimony with the collaboration of Elizabeth Burgos, and the positive and negative reception to her work throughout the world reveal is just how difficult it is to go beyond one's world view and to hear what another is saying. This is perhaps Rigoberta's greatest challenge to us all.

The Mayans have a saying that “every mind is a world,” that is, that any one person is as rich in complexity and change as the universe. So even if Rigoberta did not tell us explicitly that she was not going to reveal all her Quiché secrets, we would still understand that we can never grasp this woman in her entirety. Rigoberta escapes our desire to know her and even hints that our attempts to gain this knowledge is a desire for possession. Even though she gives us only what she wants to know about Rigoberta the public figure, she tells us enough about her values and dreams to confound attempts to reduce her to a merge symbol to fulfil someone's need for a left-wing menace, the downfall of Western culture, the salvation of a multicultural America, or the essence of the eternal Mayan. Rigoberta's life story represents her vision of a better Guatemala: she embodies her Quiché heritage yet is open to the world beyond it, she makes public the extremely painful deaths of family members to speak out for human rights, and she maintains an ideal of social justice after many years of struggle and sacrifice. Rigoberta Menchú is a woman of courage who still has much to teach us.

Notes

1. Kay B. Warren, “Transforming Memories and Histories: The Meanings of Ethnic Resurgence for Mayan Indians,” in Americas: New Interpretive Essays, ed. Alfred Stephan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 197–201; and Kay B. Warren, ed. The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).

2. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (London: Verso Press, 1984), 245.

3. Others include Domitila Barrios de Chungara with Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); and Elvia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, trans. and ed. Medea Benjamin (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).

4. Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991), 72.

5. Rigoberta Menchú, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú: Y así me nació la conciencia (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1985).

6. Menchú, I, Rigoberta, 244.

7. Ibid., 246.

8. Ibid., 189.

9. Warren, “Transforming Memories,” 190–93.

10. Rigoberta Menchú y Comité de Unidad Campesina, Trenzando el futuro: luchas campesinas en la historia reciente de Guatemala (Donostia, Spain: Tercera Prensa, 1992), n.p. Translation mine.

11. “Guatemalan Indian Accepts a Nobel,” New York Times International, 11 December 1992.