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 peasants to work for at least 150 days per year for either the fincas or the state. This law, in conjunction with the military's takeover of Indian land (thereby rendering Indians "landless" in the eyes of the law), is the reason why Menchú's family and so many others had to migrate to the coast for most of every year to work on the fincas.
             A new government came into power in 1944, beginning a period known as the ' 'Ten Years of Spring,'' with Arbenz as president. Labor and land laws were modified to favor peasants' rights; land was taken from corporations and redistributed back to peasants. Unfortunately for the peasants, the largest corporate ...