ABSTRACT
Rigoberta Menchu's book told the harrowing story of oppression of Mayan Indian peasants by light-skinned landowners in Guatemala. It tells how she joined the guerrilla movement that flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book has strong appeal because it stressed indigenous rights, feminism, identity politics, Marxist class analysis—virtually the entire bundle of concerns of the campus left. The Nobel was given in 1992 as a sort of anti-Columbus prize given to an oppressed native of the Americas on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing. But Menchu's version of events has been picked apart in a book by David Stoll, a Middlebury College anthropologist who interviewed 120 people in Menchu's hometown. "Sacrilegious" is a good word, because it captures Menchu's current status as a semi-religious political icon. Besides, the oppressed are never supposed to be analyzed or criticized by professors representing the oppressor cultures of the West.
