Rigoberta Menchu, an illiterate Maya peasant from Guatemala, testified in her biography, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, about the horrors and violence of the Guatemalan government against the natives, which led to the Mayan genocide. This biography published in 1984 rallied the international community to force the Guatemalan government to sign a peace treaty with the indigenous community. There were a few characteristics, at least through self-portrayal, that worked in Menchu’s favor and eventually earned her the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize:
“Menchu’s most effective weapon, and the main reason for the success of her book, was her ability to describe the atrocities involving herself and her family […] Menchu’s skill in universalizing her personal ordeal accounted in no small measure for the autobiography’s literary and commercial success” (Robin, 168).
“As a woman, a person of color, a victim of imperialism, and the subaltern of a dominant Latino culture, Menchu was a perfect ‘quadruple victim,’ D’Souza declared” (Robin, 171). Just through the nature of who Menchu was, by her race, gender, and class, she embodied the perfect character set-up to make her autobiography a success as well as a powerful weapon against the Guatemalan government. “In part, the resonance of her story lay in her artful pandering to the sentimental and patronizing precepts of her audience, such as her self-representation as an unschooled peasant with broken Spanish” (Robin, 177).
Unfortunately, her story proved to be exaggerated, most of her character were created to create a certain perception of Menchu by the Western public, who were sensitive about opposing or critiquing the Holocaust narrative: “Within this framework victims are assigned moral qualities by virtue of their sufferings” (Robin, 185). David Stoll, an anthropologist, critiqued the claims that Menchu made, especially about her family. Unlike the testimony in her book, Menchu’s father was a land-owner who was pretty well-off, and one of her brothers who supposedly died in a conflict with the government was alive and working.
David Stoll, however, is not criticizing the cause or the end goal of Manchu and her work. The key is that he is critiquing the her means of manipulating through false representation of what she presents to be truths; he critiques Manchu’s work, not the history or the fact of the genocide: “At no point, however, did Stoll challenge the fundamental truth or the essential elements of the collective tragedy depicted in the book” (Robin, 174).
Some critics, including Robin and Stoll, however, argue that these self-created character hurts the cause by misrepresenting other voices within the Maya community. “The book presented a heroine ‘edited and airbrushed into an icon,’ sorely lacking the complexities and petty ambiguities of real-life events” (Robin, 192).
Purenbit 