ABSTRACT
The secrets Rigoberta Menchu refers to are ancestral ones, of the kind passed from elders to the young. Some scholars are quick to excuse Rigoberta from accountability on the grounds that she is from a non-Western culture, therefore must operate on a different truth standard. Still another argument in Rigoberta’s defense is that like anyone in that position, she was traumatized and obsessed by the sudden loss of her family. In her 1982 story, Rigoberta reiterates that she is not telling her listener everything. Once Rigoberta was in the political apparatus of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, there could be a pragmatic reason for denying her education: to protect the clergy who smuggled her to safety. Rigoberta’s mentors probably advised her to broaden her story, to make it more typical of the oppression of Guatemalan peasants. The North Americans who worked with Chimel on development projects were another problem.
