Rigoberta menchu
I, Rigoberta Menchú at first seems like an autobiography, but that is not what it is meant to be. Menchú wrote the book as a testimony of her people's lives to be a voice for her people and show the world what is going on. There is a lot of controversy about whether Rigoberta deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, and if this book should be taught to students. There are allegations that she fabricated a lot of the story. People say that the book is not an accurate portrayal of her life. I do not think the book was meant to just be a story of her life, but a story of her people as a whole and what they went through. The life of the Indians in Guatemala was a difficult life. When Guatemala's economy changed from an agrarian economy to a trade economy based on coffee in the late 1800s, the government needed more and more land on which to grow this lucrative cash crop. To satisfy its need for land, the government employed a strategy known as ''land grabs,'' whereby arable land was forcibly taken from Indian villages and used to grow coffee and other cash crops. Because coffee was labor intensive to process, the government began to pressure Indian communities to work on plantations, by passing a 'vagrancy law' requiring all landless p
Indians from different groups were able to meet and compare experiences and, eventually, communicate and organize. In testimonio, it is the intentionality of the narrator that is paramount. Zimmerman argues that in a ''crisis period'' such as that of the 1960s-1980s in Guatemala, that writers create new forms representing new perspectives each straining to express the social whole, such as the form created in Menchú's autobiography. Testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, a struggle for survival, implicated in the act of narration itself. One of Menchú's earliest and most vocal critics, Dinesh D'Souza, former editor of the conservative college paper the Dartmouth Review and author of Illiberal Education, questioned the veracity of Menchú's status as an impoverished victim of centuries-old discrimination, exploited by corrupt landowners. The guerrilla movement developed in response to the government's brutal tactics, in tandem with a groundswell of grassroots organizing, such as literacy campaigns, farming cooperatives, and health initiatives for the poor. It was during the period of authoritarian rule following Arbenz' administration that the ''land grabs'' were in full force; peasant lands were once again forcibly reappropriated and peasant resistance crushed. -backed military coup in 1954, part of the United States' worldwide anti-Communism campaign, and was replaced by a military dictatorship. Menchú explains herself, on the first page, that her story is the story of all poor Guatemalans: ''my personal experience is the reality of a whole people. During a peaceful occupation of the Spanish Embassy, against the protests of the Spanish ambassador, the army set fire to the building, killing all but one protester, including Menchú's father. An irony is that the finca system actually brought groups of Indians into contact, a gathering which would have been difficult otherwise, given the remoteness of most Indian villages. Labor and land laws were modified to favor peasants' rights; land was taken from corporations and redistributed back to peasants. David Stoll, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, conducted years of fieldwork in Guatemala and claims to have found people whose recollections of events described by Menchú differ greatly from hers. easants to work for at least 150 days per year for either the fincas or the state. It is not the sheer veracity of her facts that determines the value of her story in a political-social context, but that the truth of the Guatemalan peasant experience is revealed, comprehended, and honored.
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