nce. History, it is said, is written by the conquerors. Histories are based on the surviving records of societies. The vanquished are often rendered helpless through repression of the means of expression that would allow them to reach beyond their immediate groups. Such repression includes the imposition of standards of language and literary style that are foreign to the groups. It also includes limits on access to publishing, to education, and to the leisure needed for writing.
In her autobiography, Rigoberta Menchu recalls her father's fear that, in learning to read and write, his daughter would be acquiring skills that were of no use to the village. It was not easy to find teachers or to spare time or money for lessons. Rigoberta would, he argued, leave as others had done, and this would not be a contribution to the group but a diminishing of its collective effectiveness. Thus, for societies where the written text has no significant role, the people will often resist it out of traditional or practical concerns. Even though her father was, himself, deeply involved in the peasants' struggle, his traditional point of view simply did not take in writing as a means of carrying on that struggle. In every respect, Menchu was barred from acquiring the voice that the larger Guatemalan society used.
The silence that is forced on the disenfranchised is of vital importance in their continued domination. Once a person speaks, she or he begins to reduce the convenient appearance of being the absolute other, a guise that is fundamental to the oppressor's view of that person. In all of these narratives, the writers' discovery of this objectification resulted in their transformation of the voices of their people into written forms that would extend the voices' range and bear witness to the people's experiences.
Of this group, only the Aztec chroniclers in The Broken Spears write in a language other than that of their oppresso...