Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans [Hardcover]

David Stoll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 1998

This book is about a living legend, a young Guatemalan orphaned by government death squads who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was “the story of all poor Guatemalans.” Published in the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú, her words brought the Guatemalan army’s atrocities to world attention and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Five years later, as her country’s civil war ended and truth commissions prepared their reports, the Nobel laureate seemed to repudiate the life story that made her famous. “That is not my book,” she said, accusing its editor, Elisabeth Burgos, of distorting her testimony.Why the disclaimer? One reason was the anthropologist interviewing other violence survivors in her home town. In Rigoberta Menchú and The Story of All Poor Guatemalans, David Stoll uses their recollections and archival sources to establish a different portrait of the laureate’s village and the violence that destroyed it. Like the imagery surrounding Ché Guevara, Rigoberta’s 1982 story served the ideological needs of the urban left and kept alive the grand old vision of Latin American revolution. It shaped the assumptions of foreign human rights activists and the new multicultural orthodoxy in North American universities. But it was not the eyewitness account it purported to be, and enshrining it as the voice of the voiceless caricatured the complex feelings of Guatemalan Indians toward the guerrillas who claimed to represent them. At a time when Rigoberta’s people were desperate to stop the fighting, her story became a way to mobilize foreign support for a defeated insurgency.By comparing a cult text with local testimony, Stoll raises troubling questions about the rebirth of the sacred in postmodern academe. Far from being innocent or moral, he argues, organizing scholarship around simplistic images of victimhood can be used to rationalize the creation of more victims. In challenging the accuracy of a widely-hailed account of Third World oppression, this book goes to the heart of contemporary debates over political correctness and identity politics.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1992, a Guatemalan peasant named Rigoberta Menchú received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in pressing the civil rights claims of her country's indigenous peoples. A decade earlier, her memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchú, had appeared, and it was immediately welcomed in the nascent canon of multicultural literary and anthropological writings that has since become standard in the academy. In that memoir, Menchú gives a highly specific account of the then-ruling military government's war against tribal, rural people, making claims that she held a leadership role in the resistance, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. In a work certain to incite controversy, Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll questions the veracity of those claims, interviewing many of the people who appeared in her memoir and offering contrary testimony.

"In a peasant society ruled by elders, where girls reaching puberty are kept under close watch, it would be very unusual for a person of her age and gender to play the leadership role she describes," Stoll writes. Neither, he argues, was she monolingual and illiterate, as she claimed to be; her presentation of self as "noble savage," he continues, gave her an unwarranted moral authority when she presented stories that she had heard from others as if she had been a participant. His findings, Stoll notes, do not discount the real violence visited by the Guatemalan government on its subjects, although they certainly might give comfort to apologists of the regime. (Interestingly, he notes, Menchú has since disavowed portions of her memoir as the work of the French anthropologist who recorded them.) --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Stoll (Is Latin American Turning Protestant?) has written a revisionist biography of a Guatemalan woman canonized and, according to Stoll, ultimately misunderstood by the academic and political left. He tries to replace what he believes to be the prevailing romantic image of Guatemalan rebellion with something that comes much closer to the murky, morally shaded truth. In 1982, I, Rigoberta Menchu, the autobiography of a Mayan peasant woman, catapulted its author onto the international stage. In 1992, on the symbolically loaded 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World, Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize. Stoll challenges major and minor aspects of Menchu's book, using interviews, conducted over a nine-year period, with soldiers, guerrillas and survivors of violence from Menchu's hometown and surrounding region. Painstakingly delineating the complex cultural and political landscape of Guatemala, Stoll refutes Menchu's "simplified" account of land-poor Mayans taking up arms against wealthy landowners, painting instead a picture of peasants?both indigenas and ladinos?who wish only to be left alone but are caught between guerrilla and government armies. Arguing that Menchu's book mythologizes the experience of poor Guatemalans, Stoll explores the implications of such a sentimental view for academia, solidarity activists and Guatemalans themselves. His generally supportive attitude toward the peasants' cause and his denunciation of the army's terror makes his book all the more convincing. This is provocative reading that's sure to shake up assumptions?and rile tempers?across the political spectrum.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press; First Printing edition (December 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813335744
• ISBN-13: 978-0813335742
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,041,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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63 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You can still tell the bad guys from the good guys!, August 9, 1999

By 

Richard Stoller ([e-mail]) (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans (Hardcover)

David Stoll's book is an impressive work of investigation, and he has a genuine concern for the oppressed (despite what you've heard in the triumphalist right-wing media and the furious left-wing media)...but the book does have two problems. One of them really is Stoll's fault, but the other just "comes with the territory":

1) Even though Stoll spends (literally) the whole book parsing Rigoberta's story and explaining why he thinks it's vital to do so, the reader is never quite clear on why the whole exercise is important. If it's to reveal that a narrator's truth, even in the testimony genre, is a fudgy thing, then why the often reproachful tone? If it's to show that testimony is deployed for instrumentalist purposes (i.e. means to an end), the argument is essentially trivial, because we all know that. (Moreover, Rigoberta's purposes are clear to any reader of her book--that was surely her own measure of the narrative's success. She explicitly didn't want the book read for "anthropological insight," but rather for political action.) If it's to show a collective and selective blindless on the left, well, let's leave that one for the next section--

2) Stoll accepts that the Guatemalan army and its local operatives were every bit as nasty as Rigoberta alleges: he faults her for personalizing details (i.e. alleging that what happened to others actually happened to her and hers), but he never downplays or denies the army's murderous abuses. But the cumulative result is a weird and inevitable imbalance: more time and critical gaze are spent on the murderousness of the left--responsible for only a small percentage of total casualties, according to the Truth Commission--than on that of the right, apparently because it's just so obvious what the right was about. It's sort of like (to skip to the hackneyed parallel) doing a book on the Warsaw Ghetto that critiques the Jewish response...it's perhaps worth doing, but it puts an enormous burden on the reader to recall the context, i.e. that the errors (or even crimes) of one side are trivial compared to the crimes (calculated, rather than errors) of the other. The imbalance is the same on the "symapthizer" side: the book deals critically with the reception of the book by the foreign left, which is appropriate given the book's subject, but that foreign left's failings are trivial compared to those of the foreign (read US) right, which sought to expunge any record of military atrocities, and still does. The fact that some Amazon reader-reviewers could take Stoll's book as vindication of the army policies of the 1980s shows the pitfalls of Stoll's engaged-yet-detached (in the sense of "let the chips fall where they may") approach.

Lastly, Stoll could do a little better with his counterfactuals. He faults Rigoberta's book for quite possibly prolonging the conflict and postponing the peace accords, perhaps by as much as 12 years. This is a bit myopic: what kind of peace would the army have accepted in the mid-1980s? Stoll himself says that the army was in no mood to compromise for many years, which flies in the face of his criticism of the book. More broadly, he faults the armed left for creating a situation in which the army could carry out its murderous sweeps; this myopia is partially addressed in my point (2), above, but it also assumes that purely peaceful protest would have been received nonviolently by the state/army. Raise your hand if you believe that!

Don't get me wrong: this is a very impressive book, and I'm very glad that Stoll wrote it. (The core of the book, in the research sense, is very strong: his description of Vicente Menchu's decidedly non-stereotypical career as man-on-the-make.) There's a lot to learn here, for everyone...it's just that some it is in the form of a cautionary tale about the intersection of anthropology and presentist politics!

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An iconoclast makes important points., November 6, 2001

By 

S.E. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans (Paperback)

David Stoll's book makes important points. To what extent can the testimony of a single person represent the situation faced by a larger community? What happens when a single figure comes to embody a movement, and that figure has conveyed misrepresentations of the truth?
Stoll does not claim that many poor Guatemalans did not face unbearable oppression, or that they were not massacred by para-military death squads. However, he does note that, like 1980s and early 1990s Peru, the indigenous sometimes felt trapped. He suggests that both the military and leftist guerrillas would use murder as a means to coerce the indigenous into subordination.
Although Stoll pats himself on the back for having waited until Guatemala's lengthy civil war ended, one must question whether his timing was appropriate. His book provided ammunition for the military government to negate claims of torture and disappearances at a time when United Nations Truth Commissions were investigating military abuses.
The issues brought up by Stoll are important, but could be addressed in a less slanderous manner. As Victor Montejo points out, the picture of Rigoberta Menchu on the cover is inappropriate. If Stoll is in fact claiming not to be an iconoclast, why is the photograph on the cover? Why is Rigoberta's name in the title?
Let there be no doubt that Rigoberta did have a political agenda. However, if there are several exaggerations, the story should not be discredited. Consider the genre: testimony. Rigoberta was interviewed for hours a day, for about a week (I believe). Rigoberta did not edit the text. Also, we do not know what questions were asked, and how they influenced Rigoberta's responses. We do know that Burgos-Debray has marxist connections. An interviewer can have a profound effect upon the interviewee, in this case a young twenty-three year-old.

32 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Powerful analysis, but..., September 4, 2000

By 

Timothy P. Scanlon (Hyattsville, MDUSA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans (Paperback)

To start from the proverbial beginning, Rigoberta Menchu, the Mayan Guatemalan who graced the world with her autobiographical account of the terror of the countryside of that land during its lengthy civil war, lied. The author was curious how one person could have done all that Menchu claimed to have done. It turned out she hadn't. She wasn't the eyewitness at her brother's murder; her father wasn't the organizer of various rebel groups. Indeed, witnesses who knew him claimed to have known a very different personality from the one described by Rigoberta. Further, while Rigoberta was allegedly forming various political organizations in her home village--wherein she claimed she was illiterate and monolingual--she was really the scholarship student at a girls' school and quite fluent in Spanish as well as in her native, Mayan tongue.

The consequences of that myth? romanticism? are among the analyses of Stoll's work. And I must commend him on the depth of his analysis. But...

The Guatemalans have gone through a devestating civil war in which hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them poor, have "been disappeared"--for which that new use of those verbs was created. It means, simply, that they don't exist any more (and that they're buried in one of those body dumps in which most were thrown and are now the subject of exhumations by forensic anthropologists). Stoll agrees that the Guatemalan army, civil patrols, and vigilantes have an inexcusable history. He doesn't seem to evade that. But...

Contemporary American and European leftists have made that war a battle between the victimized Mayan indigenas, and the nasty, unscrupulous, and, of course, wealthier ladinos (known elsewhere in Central America as Mestizos). Stoll points out that Rigoberta's father's major conflict was not with ladinos--with many of whom he got along just fine, thank you--but with his in- laws who were, like him, Mayan. But...

A number of guerilla groups infiltrated the countryside. Stoll examines that the bulk of Mayan and other poor were not supporters of the guerillas. Rather, they saw the guerillas as just another faction with arms. But...

I had some struggles with the book. I, like the author, am critical of white middle and upper middle class analyses of armed struggles--as if those doing the analyzing could tell the difference between a trigger and a plate of Brie cheese. At the same time, as one who is fairly well-versed in the history of the war there and is familiar with many who've suffered as a result of it--and who has been there and stopped by the army for no reason--I find it difficult to so easily exonerate the army. Sure the guerillas were not saints, despite what some of their supporters would have us believe. But desperation leads to armed conflict when there is no hope but to fight. That strikes me as common sense, and has provided the basis for any "revolution" including the American, French, Russian, etc. It's not necessarily "right" let alone "good," but simply fact.

In short, Stoll acknowledges that the Guatemalan army has, in a relative way, rivaled the Nazis (my comparison rather than his). But he clearly--and repeatedly--implies that the army's brutality was instigated by the actions of the guerillas. For instance, a couple of ladinos were killed by guerillas therefore the army became vioent and wiped out villages. Doubtless there was some guerilla activity that stimulated a violent response. But the extent of the army's violence--the formal, objective report issued less than two years ago says that of the violence, the army was responsible for 97 percent leaving little to blame on the guerillas--so overshadowed that of the rebels that the latter's is negligible, barely exists in a statistical sense.

Further, I was turned off by Stoll's overuse of the word "Marxist." Whether Stoll is a right wing activist, I don't know. (As he claims to be a scholar, I hope not.) But the words "the right" came up seldom while nearly everyone, from Allende in Chile to most of the guerilla groups came up as "Marxist." And that's all too often a devil term used to classify as "enemy" rather than to examine one's political or economic policies.

Still, I recommend the book's analyses. I agree with Stoll that even the human rights movement is compelled to draw a good vs. evil distinction rather than examining the complexities of an issue; the academy these days has too much influence of the post-modernists who love to designate others as victims (thereby often freeing those who've done the designating from amending their own comfortable lifestyles to do anything about it).

Indeed, to his credit, Stoll, in at least four places in the text, tries to examine why Rigoberta would have manufactured her story. He asks others too why they think she would do so. He niether frees her from the fallacy nor indicts her for perjury but examines. That attempt to understand her is particularly well-taken.

I must confess too that, despite my appreciation for his analyses, I can give him at best three stars due to guilt by association. That right wing demagog David Horowitz in one of his tracts uses Rigoberta's fabrication as an excuse to refute human rights causes in general. Perhaps--again, ideally--Stoll did not intend that with his examination. But I can't help thinking of Horowitz's reference which I read before reading this work. And that doesn't help Stoll's credibility.

If nothing else, if you read this volume, learn from the technique that the author uses to investigate a story, who he talks with and how he reaches a conclusion. If you come to different conclusions, as I have, more power to you.