Rigoberta Mench´u and David Stoll: contending stories

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.