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Summary: The world is changing: a review on the mayans
Review: There are times in your live when you realize that all the complications and "suffering" that you have to endure is something miniscule. That your whining about how the grass isn't growing pretty in the lawn or about how your life [is hard] because you are only getting paid $10, $12 dollars an hour and that is not enough to pay the $40,000 dollar car and the house and all those thing you need for your "simple" life are a testament of how God is not fair to you. But then, when you read something like I, Rigoberta de Menchu you come to realize that maybe, just maybe all the tragedy in your life is not so tragic. That is the beauty of this book. The realization that there are so many things out there in the world that we not even acknowledge as something real and with substance is what this book reminds you of. We live in a cynical, cynical world that focuses on money, [adult relations], and entertainment and most of the times the problems concerning other parts of the world are irrelevant until one of our own is involve. This is reality, but there is the other realities of people who really suffer and have to face adversity everyday and we, the privilege, don't even care.
(...) I, Rigoberta de Menchu, is an eye opener. It is cruel, sad, gross, devastating, and uplifting book all at the same time. It has value, morals and character something that our community, our entire nation sometimes lacks and that reminds you how little we know about the problems that the human race faces in general. Nevertheless, the narration is extremely moving and compassionate and brought to ink very vividly. I have to admit that there are segments of the book, which are really hard to digest and absorb. There are images that stick to your mind and your spirit like sun to the ground, they might leave you for a while but you know that once inserted they will always comeback to hunt you and will never leave you, not really.
(...)The book reveals the treatment that Mayas, and Indians in general have had to endure for so many years. Seclusion, rejection, discrimination, assassination, and many, many worse things that make your heart shatter. While reading this book you can help but think how humans are capable of doing so many atrocities to fellow members of their species without discriminating if they are men, women or children. It is something barbaric that in a nation like the U.S. seems to be like a Mel Gibson film, something unreal that during our lifetime should not be happening but, that unfortunately it is and with more frequency that it should ever be. Rigoberta accomplishes to tell the reader about the importance of community and respect towards any person. She establishes importance of unity that should be contemplated as something precious among human beings because that is the only way were are going to survive in this world that becomes smaller every day.Personally, it was hard to read this book because I have fellow countrymen that are Mayan and it is really sad to acknowledge the problems they face are also happening in Mexico. Also, because I spend years studding about how magnificent and powerful their civilization used to be and how modernization is finishing with all the values and practices that made their culture one of a kind in the history of the world. I'll be the first to tell you that modernization is essential for the development of the world, without it we could not survive in this fast growing world, but it is truly a shame that we have to take advantage of people that all they desire is to maintain an style of life that doesn't require technology to be self-sufficient. This is what I am against of, taking advantage of people because we can. This world needs more compassion and understanding. Until the day we realize that we are doomed to keep making mistake like creating conflicts with people we believe to be "uncivilized" when perhaps they are the rational side of the story. In my point of view, Rigoberta's message is that of -life and freedom for all- I think that is all she wants for her fellow Mayan brothers and sisters to be allowed to live a simple life where their custom will be protected and where their freedom will be left alone with nature. It seems to me that all they ask for is to be allowed to unite with nature in the future like they did in the past. Now, is that too much to ask?
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Summary: True story or not it's a compelling story
Review: There has been a lot of controversy about whether or not this book is fact or fiction. Whatever it is, Menchu has written a powerful account of the harsh realities of peasant life in a third-world country. She has written a moving story which I highly recommend.
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Summary: I, Rigoberta Menchu-Amy Tehan
Review: This book is rich with cultural insights and details, and Rigoberta tells us her story with passion and an inner strength that can only come from years of persecution. Although her reasons for narrating her story are to enlighten the rest of the world to the situation of the Indians in Guatemala, she chooses to focus on her culture and their customs instead of the many mass attrocities committed by the "ladinos", landowners, and government in her country. In my opinion, this is a much more effective technique in gaining the audience's sympathy and respect, because she gives us so much to sympathize with. She gives her readers a base of understanding of her culture that the oppressors in her country do not have. Anyone who reads this book will be awed at the communal living of her culture, and I myself have the utmost respect for the Indians' hard work and love of the earth. If only we could all live like that...
Although she does tell us about the many deaths she witnessed at the hands of her oppressors and about the grief they have caused so many, these incidences are only a part of her life. She has an uncanny ability to take strength from both her defeats and her victories, and she uses this strength to drive her efforts to give the Indians an equal footing with the rest of Guatemala.
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Summary: I, Rigoberta Menchu-Amy Tehan
Review: This book is rich with cultural insights and details, and Rigoberta tells us her story with passion and an inner strength that can only come from years of persecution. Although her reasons for narrating her story are to enlighten the rest of the world to the situation of the Indians in Guatemala, she chooses to focus on her culture and their customs instead of the many mass attrocities committed by the "ladinos", landowners, and government in her country. In my opinion, this is a much more effective technique in gaining the audience's sympathy and respect, because she gives us so much to sympathize with. She gives her readers a base of understanding of her culture that the oppressors in her country do not have. Anyone who reads this book will be awed at the communal living of her culture, and I myself have the utmost respect for the Indians' hard work and love of the earth. If only we could all live like that...
Although she does tell us about the many deaths she witnessed at the hands of her oppressors and about the grief they have caused so many, these incidences are only a part of her life. She has an uncanny ability to take strength from both her defeats and her victories, and she uses this strength to drive her efforts to give the Indians an equal footing with the rest of Guatemala.
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Summary: Guatemala as it really is
Review: This book revealins the life of an Indian girl growing up in Guatemala. She gives testimony to the harse lifestyles that exist in Guatemala. The information in the book is pertinent to Guatemala and whatit was like during the revolutionary war ers. While the war itself has ended, there is still much unrest. The indigneous Indians of Guatemala are strong in character and in their faith. They are a homogeneous group that care for each other. She describes her life in very graphic terminology, which supports the relevence of her story. We need to know what went on and she spares no details. Since it is written as an autobiography, it stays with you for a long time. She is still taking a stand in Guatemala for those like her and that is quite a risk. This book is well worth reading.
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Summary: This book is Mostly Fabrication
Review: This book, often assigned as reading in schools across the country, has been revealed as mostly fabricated. The touching scene of her brother's death is mitigated by the fact that he is STILL ALIVE. Books like this do damage to people's perceptions of the truth. Menchu should be stripped of her Nobel Prize. For more information on the falsehoods in this blatantly fictional book, see the following article: www.boundless.org/1999/departments/isms/a0000074.html.
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Summary: One-sided
Review: this was a very good book, if not very disturbing. i'm told that the author (Menchú) was told to give a very one-sided black and white account. even that being the case, this book is about 10 times more tragic than any nazi movie or book you'll read. and the worst part about it is this was going on and still is to some degree, in the US' backyard and we refused to do anything about it. i challenge anyone to read this book and not get involved with the indigineous struggle in Guatémala.
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Summary: I believe that it was was informative.
Review: Those who don't believe her story and call her a liar are very ignorant. Things don't have to directly happen to you, they can happen to people around you (and it feels like it is happening to you). I think the Ms. Menchu did a fabulous job in showing how third-world people are inhumanely treated by those countries whose purpose is to "civilize" them.
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Summary: A good primary source document on Mayan culture
Review: To completely dismiss this book as garbage merely on the grounds that not everything is true is a bit foolish. Few people telling their own stories tell a complete truth. For those who seek to read a good account of how counter-insurgency forces decimated villages, I recommend Victor Montejo's book Testimony: Death of a Guatelmalan Village. Back to Menchu's story --I am fully aware that David Stoll has written a book which exposes several "lies" by Menchu. However, I still contend that this book is of immense historical and anthropological value. Few books give us such description of the Mayan lifestyle (though the Mayan lifestyle is not a homogenous one as their fallen empire is one of many different ethnicities). This book provides us with good examples of duality between Christianity and Mayan traditions, the racial hierarchy present in Guatemala (also present in other Hispano-american nations), and indigenous myths associated with the presence of the white man. (Notably that medicines introduced from whites have been less effective than the formerly used herbs and roots, etc. Menchu also made a reference that she'd heard elders say snakes did not bite the indians prior to the arrival of the whites.) We also may consider that the "immediate family" in indigenous groups may not be as immediate as we westerners are accustomed to.
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Summary: Rigoberta Menchú
Review: When I first finished the book, I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian Woman in Guatemala, I was fairly depressed by its content. The accounts of her younger brothers, dying from malnutrition and being burned alive were horrifying. I was also very interested in the way that the Indians of Guatemala had adopted the Christian religion and used this worship as an emotional outlet and salvation almost from the exact people who had introduced it to them. I immediately felt as though I needed to know more about Rigoberta and her life. I decided to search for information on women of Guatemala and their religion, feminism, and other books by Rigoberta Menchú. However, I found more than I expected. Not only did I find wonderful testaments to her survival and leadership, and her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, but to my dismay, I also found an enormous amount of debate surrounding the validity of her accounts.
From the same book, from which I heard the crying voice of the Native American culture of Guatemala, others heard political feminist/Marxist manipulations of the truth and self pity. What seemed like the raw and exposed brutality of Guatemala's civil war was almost erased from my mind by many (all of whom I found to be men) disgruntled opinions.
Anthropologist David Stoll, was the first person I discovered to question I, Rigoberta Menchú. It seems as though he has uncovered evidence of lies within Menchú 's story. Based on nearly a decade of interviews with more than 120 people and archival research, Stoll concludes that Ms. Menchú's book "cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be" because the Nobel laureate repeatedly describes "experiences she never had herself."
Using contacts provided by Dr. Stoll and others found independently, a reporter for the New York Times conducted several interviews that contradict Ms. Menchú's account. It was found that relatives, neighbors, friends, and former classmates of Rigoberta Menchú, including an older brother and half sister and four Roman Catholic nuns who taught and sheltered her, indicated that many of the main episodes related by Ms. Menchú have either been fabricated or seriously exaggerated.
In their contradicting version, the interviewed claim that the land dispute, which was a central part of the book, was a drawn out family feud between her father and his in-laws. They stated that it was not a battle against wealthy landowners of European descent who manipulated government agencies into trying to drive her father and other Indian peasants off unclaimed land that they had cleared and farmed. They also maintained that a younger brother whom Ms. Menchú says she saw die of starvation never existed, while a second, whose suffering she says she and her parents were forced to watch as he was being burned alive by army troops, was killed in entirely different circumstances when the family was not present. Contrary to Ms. Menchú's assertion in the first page of her book that "I never went to school" and could not speak Spanish or read or write until shortly before she dictated the text of I, Rigoberta Menchú, she in fact received the equivalent of a middle-school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Roman Catholic nuns.
Of course, from this new information, that she spent much of her youth in the boarding schools, those in disbelief have concluded that it is extremely unlikely that she could have worked as an underground political organizer and spent up to eight months a year laboring on coffee and cotton plantations, as she describes in great detail in her book. I find the whole mess to be nauseating, either way you look at it. I do believe in my heart that this woman has endured great difficulty in her life, no matter which way her younger brother was murdered. However, I also know that she should have told her story, the real story no matter what. If she has told the truth, I am still not relieved. If that is the case, it only means that she is now being further oppressed for what has happened to her, and her intentions of helping the women and Indians of Guatemala has been received in vain. Unfortunately, I do not think that the answer is quiet that clear. The real truth might exist in a little bit of Menchú's story, and a little bit of Dr. Stoll's findings. This being the case, it is less important what her words were, but completely vital what they meant.
This story should be read. Apparently, it is almost only in the Ivy-League schools that this book remains considered worth incorporating in the syllabi of many courses.
I dont think that the facts should have been, or needed to be altered to create the effect Rigoberta Menchu desired. However, it does seem as though she alludes to a deeper message than just the story of her life.
If the book is approached with a careful eye, instead of in a critical and judgemental manner, the important text that I discovered it to be will be experienced. It is impossible for me to cover all the parts of I, Rigoberta Menchú that I found most interesting. But a few include the study and use of the bible by her people, as well as the strength that they gathered from their interpretation of the religion brought to them. One of her statements which really made me think was, "They're dead (the first catechists who fell) but our people keep their memory alive through our struggle against the government, against an enemy who oppresses us."
I think that Rigoberta does have charismatic leadership ability, and that this book is an example of part of her plan to help her people. This, I can not hold against her, because every group needs someone who is willing to take on thier suffering and the stuggle for thier peace. Sometimes this does mean using tactics that are not favorable with the general public. It is possible though that she has an aim with this book, that is beyond the grasp of simple critisim. I also this that from reading Stoll's work, that he sees this as well. Her country is not the only one dealing with persecusion, and therefore, why should this story's intent be so difficult to believe and understand?
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