Abstract :
This paper reconnects the major texts, Rigoberta Mench´u’s autobiographical I, Rigoberta
Mench´u (Menchu & Debray, 1984) and David Stoll’s Rigoberta Mench ´ u and the story of all poor
Guatemalans (Stoll, 1999) with the historical contexts and continuities in which they have
been and are active. Its interest is in examining them in the connections between popular
on-the-ground struggles in Guatemala and the textual representations entered into in
ideological struggles in North America. The writer does not dissociate herself from the latter.
She takes up her position on the progressive side, recognizing Mench´ u’s story, with all its
problems, as speaking from native peoples’ experiences of repression and struggles in the
highlands of Guatemala. Her interest is in how Stoll’s text goes to work on Mench´ u’s, in the
implicit historicity of his study that is submerged by his claim to an objective empiricism, and
in how his “findings” have been progressively attenuated as they pass through media versions
to simplified representations and coffee-shop gossip. While Mench´ u’s story and vivid
presence had breached the wall of silence constructed against news of the U.S. involvement
in repression in Central America, Stoll repairs the breach by destroying her credibility and
the credibility of her story.
