ABSTRACT
Rigoberta Menchu returned to Chimel for some years before resuming her schooling, this time in the town of Uspantan at the age of twelve to fourteen. Although Rigoberta has often said that she grew up monolingual and illiterate, this is how she is remembered in Uspantan. What distinguished her was that Catholic nuns took her away to boarding school. The nuns also sponsored Rigoberta at the government primary school a few blocks from the parish compound. The schoolmates agree that Rigoberta spent at least two years at the Colegio Belga in the late 1970s, enabling her to advance from the third through the sixth grades. Several schoolmates did tell me that Rigoberta was interested in politics at both boarding schools. But with little access to the outside world, there was little to protest except the nuns themselves. According to this friend, Rigoberta never talked about the Committee for Campesino Unity.
