After the Rigoberta Menchu Controversy: Lessons Learned About the Nature of Subalternity and the Specifics of the Indigenous Subject

In the United States, the debate over Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio generated by David Stoll's book,¹ has centered on whether or not Menchú told the "truth" regarding details of her personal life. According to her critics, her "lies" discredit her testimony and reduce the moral authority of leftist intellectuals who teach testimonial texts. This focus on verifiable facts conveniently ignores a discursive war tied to Cold War politics. For this reason, in my article published in the PMLA,² I explored the problematics of "truth," the nature of the testimonio as a genre, and the relationship between political solidarity and subaltern narrative, to question some of the premises on which Stoll's book is based.

In this follow-up article, I would like to address the specific ways in which Stoll's new defense of his book in "The Battle of Rigoberta," an article published in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001), continues to read Menchú "out of context" for an uninformed US audience. In that essay, Stoll portrays Menchú's discourse as "propaganda" for a guerrilla organization, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). By eliminating Menchú's own articulation of power and how it is linked to the specific political contingency of a heterotopical space named "Guatemala,"³ Stoll invests Menchú with a different reality. In Stoll's new reading, she becomes the phantasm of a Communist liar. By insinuating that Menchú's signifiers are brimming with ideologems that make her ethnicity redundant, he conveniently forces her into the stereotype of the devious, conniving person of color. This attitude masks the underlying threat and subterranean tension that subjects of color insert onto the placid, stable surface—that is, the narcissistic tyranny—of American white society. In the international political arena, and within Guatemala, Menchú has survived the controversy that sought to besmirch her image, but in the process she has gained a negative public perception in the United States, and her persona has been stripped of agency here. This iconic transmutation of Menchú abolishes her subjectivity for the majority of the American public and facilitates a reversal of meanings in her text, thus creating a more generalized American méconnaissance of her reality.

When the connections with Guatemalan political history are re-established, however, a different reading of Menchú comes forth. In this one, what we see is a singular Maya political actor speaking out in an embryonic pluricultural discourse that evokes the illusory potential for the political transformation of her country at a particular crossroads in its fortunes.⁴ It is only when we reconnect a subaltern reading of her text with Guatemalan problematics and insert both into a historical continuum, that we can grasp what her voice can mean for Latin American cultural studies. Indeed, we could claim that the Rigoberta Menchú controversy is not one about what Menchú said, that part of it is an imaginary act. Rather, it is a symbolic lesion (lesson?) about the unwillingness of hegemonic intellectuals to listen to subaltern ones.

In "The Battle of Rigoberta," David Stoll states that he remains adamantly convinced that Menchú's story is simply the EGP's version of events. An apriori assumption is thus inscribed within his rhetorical strategy; that as a subaltern, ethnicized woman, Menchú could be easily convinced to mimic the EGP's line with the same degree of innocence with which her father, Vicente Menchú, mimicked the students' slogans on the eve of his death amidst the flames that engulfed the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. This, at least, is the way Stoll represents Vicente Menchú in his book. In the present article, Stoll says:

The story that she told and Elisabeth Burgos turned into a book was instead an answer to the question: Why should we care? About another far-off conflict in which people we don't...