I, Rigoberta Menchú Themes

In I, Rigoberta Menchú, 23-year-old Rigoberta Menchú Tum relates her life experience as a member of the Maya-Quiché Indigenous community in Guatemala. For decades, landowners and complicit government institutions have sought to keep members of Rigoberta’s community and, more broadly, poor Guatemalan peasants, from owning land. As Rigoberta gives an account of her childhood as well as her adulthood as a political activist, her narrative reveals a shift in her approach to suffering and…

Much of Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s life story is concerned with identifying the roots of inequality and discrimination in Guatemalan society, where a minority of rich, mixed-race ladinos exploits the poor, Indigenous majority. Over time, Rigoberta, her family, and her community—all members of the impoverished Maya-Quiché population—realize that the political system sets them up to fail. Eager to expand its wealth and power, the upper class—which brings together landowners, the government, and the army—maintains an…

When Rigoberta Menchú Tum describes gender norms in her Maya-Quiché community, she often struggles to determine how they contribute to inequality. She wonders whether men and women’s separate roles are a potential indication of underlying machismo, a value system in which men’s behaviors and achievements are valued more than women’s. In addition, as a politically conscious woman in a traditionally minded community, Rigoberta finds herself in a difficult situation. On the one hand, her…

For Rigoberta Menchú Tum, political leaders who defend the poor in Guatemala should derive their authority not from formal education, but from the personal experience of suffering. Official education, she argues, tends to give a distorted vision of Indigenous life and encourage Indian pupils to abandon their ancestral customs. However, despite her suspicion toward certain aspects of formal education, Rigoberta engages with it herself. For example, she chooses to recount her life story not…

Respect for the natural world is one of the core principles underlying the traditions in Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s community. Conscious of the fact that they share an environment with animals and plants, Rigoberta and her fellow Indigenous Maya-Quiché people ask the natural world for permission before modifying it in any way, be it through harvesting crops, gathering flowers, or killing an animal on rare occasions (for ceremonial purposes). The respect Rigoberta’s community has for…