Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

Stoll's book examines the life story published as I, Rigoberta Menchu, in which a young Guatemalan woman, orphaned by government death squads, described her journey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile and presented that journey as the story of all poor Guatemalans. Those words brought the Guatemalan army's atrocities to world attention and helped carry her to the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen ninety-two. Stoll writes some five years later, as the country's civil war came to an end and truth commissions prepared their reports, and at a point when the laureate had publicly distanced herself from the book that made her famous. Drawing on the recollections of people from her home region and on archival sources, Stoll assembles a different portrait of the laureate's village and of the violence that destroyed it, setting what villagers told him alongside the published testimony and reconstructing the sequence of events as his sources describe it. The book therefore raises questions about what testimonial narrative can establish as history, about how such a narrative is produced, edited and received, and about how one life story came to stand for a whole population.

Written from the publisher description, Westview Press.

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