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Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans Paperback – December 9, 1999

by David Stoll (Author)

4.4 15 ratings

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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.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Westview Press
Publication date

December 9, 1999
Dimensions

6.5 x 1 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0813336945
ISBN-13

978-0813336947
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Stoll teaches anthropology at Middlebury College. His other books include Is Latin America Turning Protestant? and Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Westview Press; First Edition (December 9, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0813336945
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0813336947
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,788,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,136 in Mayan History (Books)
- #13,399 in General Anthropology
- #79,909 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

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4.4 15 ratings

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Matthew Cooper

Yes some facts and details were altered in her telling of her life story but the essential elements of what happened to people l

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2017

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This is an unfortunate snarky side swipe at the story of Rigobetya Menchu. Yes some facts and details were altered in her telling of her life story but the essential elements of what happened to people like her have been so well documented they arr beyond dispute. In fact to deny or even dilute the Guatemalan genocide is as shameful as trying to deny the Holocaust. You don't need to read this book. Check out the Wikipedia article on Las Dos Erres for example to learntheb truth.

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Mrs. Oldaker

Guatemala

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2019

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Love it . Great story

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S.E.

An iconoclast makes important points.

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2001

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.

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Il Padrone

Magnificent and well-researched expose of the fraudster that is Rigoberta ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2014

Magnificent and well-researched expose of the fraudster that is Rigoberta Menchu, and of her book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman in Guatemala.

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Julie Bolt

Witchhunt: a nasty man in an ivory tower

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2002

Stoll doggedly and biasly challenges Mechu's authenticity. By focusing on discrepancies within her testimony as told to Elisabeth Burgos-DeBray and drawing minimal attention to Menchu's actual and substantial political work on the behalf of indigenous people world wide, he paints the picture of an alternately manipulative and naïve puppet of the left. Furthermore, he suggests teachers who use Menchu in the classroom have bought into a romantic myth about virtuous Latin American rebels.
Stoll's argument is three-fold: Firstly, he balks at the
Postmodern notion that view "truth" is subjective, and, through a laundry list of discrepancies, aims at exposing Menchu's truths as false. Secondly, he frets that teachers present I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman in Guatemala as a stable, simplistic, and de-contextualized account of the massacres of Guatemalan indigenous persons. Most significantly, Stoll argues that in fetishizing Menchu we not supporting the cause of "all poor Guatemalans," as Menchu suggests in the opening lines of her testimonio, but the cause of Marxist-indoctrinated guerillas. Stoll even goes so far as to assert that the testimony of the Nobel Peace Prizewinner may have extended the violence in the Guatemalan highlands, prolonging "an unpopular war" (p.278).
Like Dinesh d'Souza's extreme right-wing book Illiberal Education, Stoll's poses a critique of the academic left. Unlike d'Souza's rant, Stoll's book is in turn a fascinating, but infuriating read, but ultimately mean-spirited, academically disingenuous and far from "objective."
For example, when Stoll points to debatable discrepancies within the testimony, he offers other voices and political contexts. He interviews people from Menchu's village El Chimel; he interviews I Rigoberta Menchu editor Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and the ambassador who survived the army-induced embassy fire in which Menchu's father ---who along with protesters had taken the ambassador hostage---dies. A chapter is devoted to fragmented interviews with women who allegedly attended a convent school with Menchu. Stoll relishs each detail that invalidates Menchu's claim that, like many other Mayan children, she did not attend formal school and only learned Spanish as she became an activist.
In many respects, Stoll's fieldwork seems exhaustive. It starts to pay off when Stoll deviates from his from his attack on Menchu's authenticity to historicize Guatemalan politics and trace the alliances of peasant and indigenous organizations. However, these discussions tend to break down as condemnations --- and conflations --- of Menchu and Marxism. Stoll's motives appear particularly ominous when it is revealed that, despite ten years of work in Guatemala, he listens to a mere two-and-a-half-hours of the eighteen hours of recorded testimony Rigoberta Menchu gives Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. And Stoll was right there in Burgos-Debray's apartment.
Many years have passed since the week in 1982 when Menchu, a political refugee, gave oral testimony to the Argentine anthropologist. Until recently, that week long meeting represented most of what the public gleaned about Rigoberta Menchu. Since the testimony concludes at the point of exile, it does not reveal Menchu's constant lobbying for indigenous rights and Guatemalan peace treaties at the UN, prior to winning the Nobel Peaceprize. It is fortunate that months before the Stoll hatchet job, Menchu's own account of her political work, including life after the Peaceprize, and episodes that were obscured in the first work, was published. Stoll's self-serving book should only be read along with its source material and her second book. Considered together, the three books fashion an intriguing matrix of truth-making, of interpretations and re-interpretations that shift based on political circumstance and personal positioning.
Still, my fundamental feeling is that Stoll was out to frame Menchu at any cost. It saddens me to see so many people jumping on his bandwagon, serving the purpose of further empowering the wealthy and privileged, and casting doubt on one of the rare voices of Central American indigenous people to reach us. Her story of oppression, resistence and survival is more important than any minor discrepencies Stoll so relishes. Stoll's book is pure careerism and is nasty to the core. Menchu's meaningful life work speaks louder. It inspires while Stoll's knarled intentions digust.

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Rigoberta Menchu And The Story Of All Poor Guatemalans Paperback – December 9, 1999

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