Two Autobiographies of Latin American Activists The purpose of this research is t

.Fire From the Mountain. and I...Rigoberta Menchu are autobiographies of Latin American revolutionary activists who identify chiefly with that label. Cabezas describes the evolution of his consciousness and life into that of a revolutionary guerrilla in Nicaragua during the regime of Somoza, while Menchu charts her life as a Quiche Indian in Guatemala to that of full-time political activist. Menchu's influence grew through the 1970s and 1980s so that she received global attention, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

It is important to understand the social and political context in which Cabezas's memoir was published in English, while he was a Sandinista government minister. It was 1985, while the U.S. government under Reagan was funding the Contras, the counterrevolutionary paramilitary group undermining the Sandinista regime. Cabezas's personal revolutionary history had begun in 1968 during Somoza's regime. He was a university student, but that status was less important to him than class, which he says was the basis of his radicalism: "I was very conscious of being from a working-class family,

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, class, gender, ethnicity, and individual-vs.-collective consciousness appear to have been much more of a piece than in Cabezas's case. If ethnicity was a feature of Cabezas's consciousness, it was the defining factor of Menchu's entire existence. This is because as a Quiche Indian, Menchu framed her entire existence by the accident of birth in a minority that the mainstream of Guatemala had historically looked on with contempt. Each of these elements and all of them, in Menchu's case, contributed to the evolution of her revolutionary persona. Gender and class combine to contribute to identity in I...Rigoberta Menchu not least because Menchu is an anomaly in a patriarchal culture. Women in leadership roles are a rarity, though Menchu cites the revolutionary work of women. In Latin America in general, it is rare that a woman of any lower class will break out of an insular and stratified communal society to have an impact on the world at large via the Nobel Prize. Menchu's public persona derives from her status as a member of an oppressed class, and her identity as a member of the Quiche community provides her with the credibility of identity as a spokesperson on behalf of her group and her collective culture. She broke out of the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1628
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)