(1959- ) memoirist
Rigoberta Menchu was born in the village of Us-panadan in the western highlands of Guatemala to Vicente Menchu, a Quiche Maya Indian and an organizer of the Committee of Peasant Unity, and Juana Menchu Tum, also a Quiche Indian. She began to work at age five to help her mother pick coffee beans. At age nine, she was helping her father hoe and plant maize, and at 12, she joined in the communal work of her people by participating in the harvesting of maize. By then, her eldest and youngest brothers had died, the former from having breathed in the fumes of pesticide that had been sprayed at the farm where he worked, and the latter from malnutrition.
At age 13, Menchu, who was eager to learn to read and speak Spanish, the language of her oppressors, decided to accept a position as a maid in the distant capital. The exploitation she experienced as a maid, as well as her father’s imprisonment at this time for his efforts at organizing against the landowners who were intent on depriving the Quiche Indians of their land, contributed to her later transformation into a leader of her people. Menchu’s political activism began when she was still a teenager, involving herself in social reform through the Catholic church, the women’s rights movement, and a local guerrilla organization. In 1979, she joined the Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC), as her father had recently done. Yet, it was not until the Guatemalan army brutally killed her father, her brother, and her mother in separate incidents in 1980 and 1981 that she became prominent in the CUC. Aware of the horrendous torture each of her family members received before being burned to death, Menchu was forced to go into hiding in 1981, first in Guatemala then in Mexico.
Since then, Menchu has dedicated her life to resisting oppression in Guatemala and fighting for the rights of all its Indian peasant groups. She was one of the founders of the United Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG) in 1982, and the following year, she recounted the story of her life and the ways of her people to the anthropologist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, who proceeded to transcribe the tapes and edit them into the internationally known book, I, Rigoberta Menchu (1983), which was translated into English by Ann Wright and published in 1984. However, an unexpected controversy erupted in 1999 after anthropologist David Stoll raised questions concerning the authenticity of Menchu’s autobiography in Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. In response to Stoll’s book, Arturo Arias edited The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy (2001), a compilation of the various newspaper reports, articles, and letters— including one by Stoll—written in response to this ongoing controversy.
After the publication of her autobiography, Menchu continued her activism, becoming a member of the National Committee of the CUC in 1986 and, in 1987, participating as the narrator of When the Mountains Tremble, a film protesting the suffering of the Maya people. Menchu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and, in 1996, became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNESCO.
Another Work by Rigoberta Menchu
Crossing Borders. Translated by Ann Wright. New York: Verso, 1998.
A Work about Rigoberta Menchu
Schulze, Julie. Rigoberta Menchu Tum: Champion of Human Rights. New York: John Gordon Burke, 1997.
