I, Rigoberta Menchu

             Above and beyond all the controversy and gray areas circling I, Rigoberta Menchu, her courage is without question commendable. There is an abundance of people that believe that Rigoberta made false accusations in her life history, but majority agree that she faced extreme obstacles throughout her life that she was ultimately strong enough to overcome.
             Her story was recorded on tape in Spanish and edited and introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. In the introduction it is stated that, "She speaks for all Indians of the American Continent."(Burgos-Debray) Rigoberta describes her cultures way of living and their extreme hatred for the "white man" for forcing their way upon them. In her early twenties she was entirely fed up with the mistreatment and disrespect her culture received over her lifetime and took a bold move to speak out. Menchu spent a week in Paris telling her story whole- heartedly to Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. She spilled out "her truths" of her past similarly to the way a raped women would let go of her emotional scars. Order and focus of conversation was often planned but very rarely achieved. For Rigoberta this wasn't just story time, but a time to free herself from the "white-man" which she has been sadly chained down by her whole life. (Debray)
             After editing the piece numerous times the final product was reorganized into aspects of her life that prove to have a lasting impact on her and other Guatemalan people. The first major topic was family. She explained the pasts of both her parents and how they ended up living in the mountains, Altiplano. They both came from extremely poor families that were raised living from day to day to survive with much hardship and loss. Her parents founded a village in the Altiplano and eventually began to produce goods in between working on the fincas. Fincas were the plantations that the white-man owned and operated, and ne...

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I, Rigoberta Menchu. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 00:40, April 25, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/10642.html