Book Notes

The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, Arutro Arias, ed. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pp. 418. $19.95, paper.

Arturo Arias begins the first essay in his anthology, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, by telling us basic facts about Guatemala’s geography. It is hard to imagine that anyone reading this book doesn’t know that Guatemala borders El Salvador. However, it is a wonderfully mundane way to start a book that describes, indeed contributes to, a dizzying academic and theoretical battle. It grounds us in the physical space that is Guatemala and reminds us of the very un-academic battle that took place on its soil.

Two decades ago, Rigoberta Menchú, then an unknown Mayan campesina, awakened the international community to the fact that Guatemalan peasants were being slaughtered. Her testimony, published in book form, sparked an awareness that helped end the war between the army and the guerillas, a war that lasted thirty-five years and took more than 200,000 lives, almost all of them civilians.[1] Menchú has become an international symbol for resistance to oppression, and for empowering indigenous peoples throughout the world.

In December 1998, David Stoll, an American anthropologist, published Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, which questioned the veracity of many of Menchú’s claims.[2] He argued that Menchú’s testimony was not “the story of all poor Guatemalans,” as she claimed it was, but rather a highly political document whose author was closely affiliated with Guatemala’s largest guerilla group, the Guerilla Army of the Poor (EGP).

Defenses, responses, and recriminations came immediately, and a battle for the history of Guatemala began.

Artura Arias, the distinguished Guatemalan writer (best known as one of the screenwriters of El Norte), has assembled a collection to explore the controversy. He separates his book into three sections. The first, titled “Background,” consists of two articles, one by Arias himself and the other by Mary Louise Pratt. The second section, “Documents: The Public Speaks,” presents almost twenty newspaper articles, editorials, and interviews from The New York Times, Madrid’s El Pais, Paris’s Le Monde, and all of Guatemala’s major newspapers. The third section, by far the lengthiest, “Responses and Implications,” is a collection of scholarly responses to Stoll’s book and comments on the controversy.

Arias uses the first section of the book to situate us in the two worlds of the controversy. His article is largely a political analysis of Guatemalan politics before and after the peace accords and a biographical introduction to Men-chú. It is unremarkable as scholarship, but is a useful map for tying the scholars’ largely theoretical explorations to the actual political situation in Guatemala.

Pratt’s article, I Rigoberta Menchú and the ‘Culture Wars,’ the second in the “Background” section, presents a fascinating history of the role of testimonial literature in the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. She situates Menchú’s book and Stoll’s book in the context of American academia, the battlefield for much of the controversy. The juxtaposition of both theaters of controversy is elegant and pleasantly surprising. Pratt’s article is unabashedly partisan. She leaves no doubt as to which side of the Culture Wars she supports—and is critical of Stoll, almost to the point of condescension.

The real background comes in the second part of the books, “Documents.” These newspaper articles and editorials are polemical, often aggressively self-interested, and fun to read. Included are Tarnished Laureate, the front page New York Times article that ignited the controversy, and responses from many of the major players, including Stoll and Menchú. The articles range from Lies by the Nobel Prize Winner, by Jorge Palmieri, the most aggressive attack on Menchú in the book, to Eduardo Galeano’s ironically titled and typically uncompromising Let’s Shoot Rigoberta, in which he declares that “the world is upside down if it is discussing now whether Rigoberta deserves the [Nobel] prize, when it should be debating whether the prize deserves her.”

It is hard to determine if these articles are commentary on the controversy or if they are the controversy itself. Newspaper articles which describe and comment on the controversy become the subject of commentary in the third section of the book, “Responses and Implications.” Though many of the authors are scholars of anthropology their approaches to the controversy are diverse. Carol A. Smith’s Why Write an Exposé of Rigoberta Menchú? directly takes on Stoll’s argument, point by point. Rather than engage too deeply Stoll’s criticisms of Menchú herself (as most of the other essays do), she addresses Stoll’s larger points about the war and the relationship between peasants and guerrillas.

Many of the essays are concerned with the politically fraught issue of truth and truth-telling—eight out of fourteen articles have the words “truth” or “lies” in their titles. A common criticism of Stoll’s book is that he misunderstands what Menchú was doing when she narrated I, Rigoberta Menchú. He read it as autobiography, but it is really testimonio, and thus requires a radically different treatment. The highlight among these articles is The Primacy of Larger Truths, by W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz, which traces the history of testimonial writing in Mayan traditions back to the years just after the conquest. It is the only article in the collection to search for antecedents to Rigoberta’s testimony in the literature of her ancestors.

Arias makes it clear that he put together this collection in part because he wanted a Guatemalan intellectual to control a book-length reckoning of the controversy. What we quickly learn, however, is that this is largely a gringo fight. Stoll’s book has yet to be translated into Spanish. Of the fourteen writers who contributed to the “Responses and Implications” section, only two are Guatemalan, and only one of those Mayan. The book gives us the sense that Guatemala has moved on and that the real battleground is in the literature and anthropology departments in United States universities.

While Arias has done a good job of assembling a collection of different views, the book is quite critical of Stoll. Only one of the fourteen articles unambiguously comes to Stoll’s defense (Whose Truth? Iconicity and Accuracy in the World of Testimonial Literature, by Daphne Patai), but even this piece is more of an attack on Menchú’s knee-jerk defenders than a vindication of Stoll’s positions. The section titled “Background,” a heading that seems to indicate objectivity, contains one of the most partial pieces in the collection.

Stoll gets a chance to answer these charges, but his response is disappointing. He reiterates and defends his claims about the role of the guerrillas in the war with conviction, but he does not address some of the more pointed criticisms of his book. Most notably he does not (or is unwilling to) engage testimonio on any terms other than those that he defines. Luckily, the controversy is no longer about Menchú and Stoll. It is about the future of Mayans in Guatemalan political life and about the future of multiculturalism in American universities. Arias’s collection tackles these two issues with creativity and vigor, and shows us that though Guatemala’s war is over, the battle over its history still rages.

—Adam Stofsky

[1]. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Women in Guatemala (Elisabeth Burgos-Debray ed., Ann Wright trans., Verso 1984).
[2]. David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press 1999).

Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 15, Spring 2002