The Book I, Rigoberta Menchu

The book I, Rigoberta Menchu details the nature of the problems facing Guatemala and the response of the people from the point of view of one peasant woman who has become a leader in the underground resistance in that country. An examination of her story provides much information on the nature of the political and social struggle in Guatemala and elsewhere in the Third World today and suggests certain relationships with theorists who have detailed their view of how change is brought about and of the way the struggle has developed to this point and is likely to develop in the future.

The story of Rigoberta Menchu is her own, arranged in this book by an anthropologist who has interviewed the woman and who shapes the material so as to categorize and arrange Rigoberta's story to be most meaningful to the reader. While the emphasis is on the everyday life of the peasants of Guatemala, the relationship between that life and the larger political struggles taking place across that nation and indeed across the borders of the countries of Latin America are made clear. The anthropologist-editor, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, provides a context for the book in her introduction to it. She notes, for instance, that Rigoberta is a Quich� Indian woman, a member of one of the largest of the 22 ethnic groups in Guatemala, and Burgos-Debray also notes the importance of Rigoberta's story:

Her life story is an account of contemporary history rather than of Guatemala itself. It is in that se

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ers developed a new understanding of their society and of the need to join organizations designed to fight these injustices and to return the land to the people. Rigoberta and her family were subject to threats, arrest, torture, and murder. The landowning class was seen more and more as the enemy. Rigoberta's father joined the CUC and helped organize others. Rigoberta is clear about her developing radical perceptions, and she expresses these concepts in terms reminiscent of Marx and other theorists when she states: We began thinking, with the help of other friends, other companeros, that our enemies were not just the landowners who forced us to work and paid us little. It was not only now we were being killed; they had been killing us since we were children, through malnutrition, hunger, poverty. We started thinking about the roots of the problem and came to the conclusion that everything stemmed from the ownership of land. What happened in Guatemala and the response of the people to it is very Marxian as described by Rigoberta. For Karl Marx, the force that determines social relations is economic and is identified by the relationship of the human being to labor. Marx has a conception of human history based on diale

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