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Byers, Paula K., ed. Encyclopedia of World Biographies. 2nd ed. Vol. 10. Detroit: Gale, 1998.

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Introduction: Rigoberta Menchú

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“My Name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am 23 years old. This is my testimony. I didn't learn it from a book and I didn't learn it alone. I'd like to stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people. . . . My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.” (- I, Rigoberta Menchú 1983)

Rigoberta Menchú has made herself known all around the world for her work towards human rights. She began her adolescence in Guatemala, as an Indian peasant where she faced countless injustices that ultimately inspired her work. Giving up her life for her beliefs, she witnessed atrocities beyond belief, such as the murder of her mother, and even ended up exiled from her own country. She has inspired and aided many people and her work earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Background Info: Birthplace

Rigoberta Menchú was born in a village in Chimel, a Quiché province of Guatemala on January 9, 1959. She was born of Indian descent and spent most of her childhood a peasant, like many Indian families living in Guatemala at the time. In 1960, her parents moved the family to a land, which they claimed and cultivated themselves. Shortly after other indigenous families followed, and thus they formed their community. Farming was their main way of life at this home, and although their crops prospered, there was still not enough to feed everyone and pay expense all the costs of living. To supplement these harvests, the family worked on coffee bean plantations for the extra money and food. On the downside however, these living areas were often cramped and unsanitary, with many people living without clean water. It was often cramped and unsanitary however, and many people lived in small areas without
clean water.

Guatemala

Background Info: Family

Rigoberta's mother was a midwife and traditional healer, and her father, Vincente, was a day laborer, catechist, and community leader. He too stood for the rights of the Indian people in the community by leading a band of people against the Spanish Embassy, and was also active in the Peasant Unity Committee, a group that fought for peasant land rights. Both parents belonged to one of the many Indigenous groups in Guatemala, the Quiché Maya, and spoke little Spanish. She had three brothers and a sister, and all seven of them were faced with unimaginable horrors that left Rigoberta practically alone. Her family amongst other things was a main inspiration that she looked to as she grew and became politically active.

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Background Info: Beliefs

Guatemalan Flag

"What hurts Indians the most is that our regalia are considered beautiful, but it's as if the person wearing them didn't exist." - Menchú

The Tribe
As part of the Quiché tribe, Quiché was the language in which was spoken, and is one of over 20 different languages spoken in Guatemala. The Quiché language is a Mesoamerican language of the Mayan language family, and Rigoberta spoke nothing else until she was nineteen years of age. The meaning of the word Quiché is, "many trees." El Quiché is also a name of a department of modern Guatemala which most of the tribe is found living in.

The culture surrounds nature, because nature is what they've used to survive since the culture's creation. Along with nature comes farming, a way of life in Quiché communities. An old legend depicts the tale of the first Quiché people who God created from corn after being unable use mud or wood.

A custom in the tribe is one that Rigoberta was told from the time she was a baby. People find it morally incorrect to eat food in front of a pregnant woman without offering to share, so that the baby will not grow up lacking food or a necessity. Mothers teach children to be respectful to everybody always for this reason, a strong principle in Rigoberta's mind.

Rigoberta's personal beliefs were based upon the freedom and equality of the indigenous people.

Background Info: Education

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Rigoberta Menchú received a primary-school education as a student at many Catholic boarding schools. She did not however receive a formal diploma. All of her wisdom and knowledge she acquired from herself, her culture, and from her experiences. She started working towards women's rights even at the young age of fourteen.

Hardships: Early Years

Coffee Beans

Rigoberta began working on the coffee bean plant when she was eight years old along with the rest of the family. They were overseen by a master who did not speak the indigenous language and were also forced to endure the toxic insecticides put on the plants. These toxins eventually killed one of Rigoberta's brothers. This was the first time Rigoberta had lost a family member to injustice.

Her family held no citizenship in Guatemala, as was the case for all other Indian people in the region. Because the Menchú family was active in bettering the community for peasants, the local government ended up suspecting them of being subversives and engaging in guerrilla tactics. It was at this time that Rigoberta's father, Vicente, was arrested and tortured because he allegedly took part in the murder of a plantation owner.

Hardships: Losses

As mentioned before, Rigoberta lost her first brother to the poisonous pesticide used on the farm. Shortly after that tragedy, another struck, as another of her brother died of malnutrition. Petrocinio, one of her other brothers, was later tortured and then killed by the army.

A year after her brother Petrocinio was killed; Rigoberta lost her father in an event that received widespread coverage in the international press. Vicente Menchú, along with other representatives of indigenous groups, occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to press their demands. The army attacked the embassy and burned it, killing 39 people, including her father, who burned to death.

The next year the army kidnapped, tortured, and quite brutally killed her mother. Shortly after that, they kidnapped Rigoberta’s final sixteen-year-old brother. The soldiers killed him too.

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Hardships: The Community Fights Back

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A group of people known as Ladinos (white and mixed Guatemalans who at this time held power in the Guatemalan economy) wanted more land to grow harvests on, and often times looked to the land of the Indigenous. In her book Crossing Borders, Rigoberta recalls a time in which the Ladinos brought contracts to the illiterate Quiché community and told lies about what was in them. The people unknowingly signed away their land, but were stubbornly reluctant in removing themselves for the landowners.

At this point, the community decided it was time to protect themselves and would set up look outs around the towns to warn of unwanted incomers. The 1980s then brought a rise in violence among the soldiers of the Ladinos and the Indigenous people. After the death of almost her entire family, Rigoberta became greatly involved in activities geared towards upsetting the Ladinos. They would often make bomb threats to company owners and then all the workers would have to leave early. Rigoberta and her fellow protesters would create barricades in the streets to purposely block the soldiers’ entrance to the town. Boycotting and vandalism were also common methods the group used.

Hardships: Exile

Rigoberta and her comrades continued these actions until she was eventually forced to flee to Mexico in 1981 for fear of ending up like her family. In Mexico she was able to meet up with other family members, grieve her losses, and also set her sights on helping all the Indigenous people in Guatemala. She traveled to Nicaragua and the United States to speak with other Indigenous leaders about what to do. She returned to Guatemala, twelve years after her initial absence, and upon doing so, she was immediately arrested. With her fears rising again, she fled for a second time.

Mexican Flag

Influential Work: "Liberation Theology"

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Rigoberta Menchú always kept in mind the well being of the poor. From the time she was little she fell into the footsteps of her parents who, like many other Central Americans, believed in "Liberation Theology." The ideology behind the phrase is that the Bible should be read for the needs of the poor, and one of Jesus Christ's main reasons for living was his ability to liberate those people. They felt very close to Jesus Christ because he too was treated unfairly, stoned, dragged along the ground, and crucified. This became the core of Rigoberta's work and the foundation of her fight for social justice.

Influential Work: Peasant Unity Committee

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In 1979, Rigoberta joined the Peasant Unity Committee as her first step towards activism. At this point she taught herself Spanish and was asked to organize all twenty-two of the Indian groups against exploitation. In 1980, a strike took place for the betterment of farm worker's conditions and she played a prominent role in that. 1981 rolled around and she was an important figure in a demonstration for the Indigenous people in the capital city of Guatemala right before she was forced into exile.


As she then fled all around the world, she began corresponding with the United Nations to try to spread her mission. She became particularly active in the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

Influential Work: Nobel Peace Prize

In October of 1992, when she was thirty-three years old, Rigoberta noticed a change in the world around her, especially the media, when people would follow her around and take pictures. Later that month, she learned that she would win the Nobel Peace Prize for "her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on the respect for the rights of indigenous peoples." She was also awarded 1.2 million dollars, and with that money set up a foundation to further her efforts of the Indians living in Guatemala.

Nobel Peace Prize

"I slept peacefully for a couple of hours, and was awoken by the telephone. My compañeros had been up all night, drinking coffee. The journalists, shivering with cold, were waiting outside in their cars. I got up and went to answer. It was the Norwegian ambassador in Mexico.
"'In nine minutes,' he said, 'it will be announced that you have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Let me be the first to congratulate you. You have nine minutes to prepare yourself, after that the news will be out.' " - Crossing Borders

Aftermath: Autobiographical Literature

In her lifetime, Rigoberta has produced two major works of literature that have gained her an excessive amount of publicity. The first and most famous is called I, Rigoberta Menchú and was published in 1983 while she was in hiding in Mexico. It was originally written in Spanish with the help of Elizabeth Burgos and was later translated into English as well as many other languages.

The second is called Crossing Borders and was published in 1998 and is a continuation of the autobiographical story she began to tell in I, Rigoberta.

Aftermath: Controversy

Since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, many people have tried to disprove the legitimacy of Rigoberta's story telling. People have gone through old town records, the records in the Spanish Embassy, and have even asked locals who knew Rigoberta to comment on its authenticity.

For example David Stoll published a work that questioned Menchú saying that " extensive interviews with local townsfolk revealed that the emotional scene in which Menchú was forced to watch her brother burned to death was inaccurate on two key points: first of all, Rigoberta Menchú was elsewhere and could not have been a witness, and second, no rebels were ever burned to death in that particular town"

David Stoll's Book On Rigobera

Another source claims…
"…In one of the most moving scenes in the book, Rigoberta describes how she watched her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition. But the New York Times found Nicolas alive and well enough to be running a relatively prosperous homestead in a Guatemalan village. According to members of Rigoberta’s own family, as well as residents of her village, she also fabricated her account of how a second brother was burned alive by army troops as her parents were forced to watch."

Her response was that it is possible she biased her story slightly, but the only reason she did so was to fully tell the story of the indigenous people. Like she said in the beginning of I, Rigoberta Menchú, the story was the story of all Guatemalan Indians.

Although these accusations and claims are tied to Rigoberta's name and her story, the message and outcome that was produced are irreplaceable.

Conclusion

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"I believe that in Guatemala the solution is not confrontation between Indigenous people and Latinos. Rather, we need a country where we can live together with mutual respect." - Menchú, 1993

Rigoberta has made an impression on the world that will last forever. She is still living today at the age of forty-nine and is still campaigning the rights of the Indigenous. In 2007, she ran for president of Guatemala, but unfortunately only received 3% of the vote. Nonetheless, her name will be remembered and commemorated for all of her work towards the equality of her people and those around them, and hopefully people will follow in her footsteps to create equality for everyone.