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The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy. Arturo Arias, ed., with a response by David Stoll. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 416 pp.
While much has been written in response to David Stoll's Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans (1998a), including an entire issue of Latin American Perspectives (1999), Arturo Arias's volume is unique in that it brings together researchers, writers and readers of I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984) to collectively make meaning out of the controversy. Just as I, Rigoberta grew beyond Menchu's life story to represent not only the Maya struggle for justice, but indigenous struggles around the world, Stoll's Rigoberta Menchu became much more than a self-described "debunker's" (Stoll 1998b) disarticulation of the public Menchu. As Claudia Fermin suggests, Larry Rohter's New York Times article "reactivated" the controversy around Menchu and recast the debate as one over truth in which Rigoberta had "lied" and, by extension, the "lie" was presented "as a gesture of many others (including all poor Guatemalans)" (p. 161). The Menchu controversy then extended to academic debates over multicultural literature (about which Mary Louise Pratt writes quite elegantly in this volume) and, inevitably to activists, advocates, and academics who support indigenous and human rights movements in Guatemala.
Arias opens the volume with a succinct history of Menchu's life within and outside of Guatemalan politics. His analysis of her transformation into a spokesperson within Guatemala is particularly fascinating because it reveals how intertwined her life is with contemporary movements for social justice. In the next chapter, Pratt shares her experience of the Stanford 1980s "culture wars" and describes their rekindling with Stoll's book. Pratt points to the dangerous implications of the "ethical scale" of Stoll's argument as well as the "benefit the book affords to the Guatemalan army and paramilitary" (p. 46).
The Arias and Pratt pieces provide background for delving into the media controversy in "Documents: The Public Speaks," which begins with Rohter's New York Times piece, an article largely based on Stoll's book and interviews with Stoll's sources in Guatemala (pp. 58-65). Other documents include interviews with Stoll and Menchu, editorials and other articles attacking or defending Rigoberta, and Dante Liano's contribution connecting attacks on Menchu to a campaign to discredit those who...