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I n the United States, the debate over Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio generated by David Stoll’s book centered on whether Menchú told the “truth” regarding details of her personal life. According to her critics, her“lies”discredited her testimony and reduced the moral authority of leftist intellectuals who taught testimonial texts. This focus on verifiable facts conveniently ignored a discursive war tied to cold war politics. For this reason ,in the previous chapter 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 chapter I would like to address the specific ways in which Stoll’s new defense of his book in “The Battle of Rigoberta,” a chapter published in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001), continues to read Menchú“out of context” for an uninformed U.S. audience. In that chapter 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,”Stoll invests Menchú with a different reality .1 In Stoll’s new reading, she becomes the phantasm of a communist liar. By insinuating that Menchús’ signifiers are brimming with ideologems that make her ethnicity redundant,he also conveniently forces her into the stereotype of the devious, conniving person of color. The result is this: although in the international political arena and in Guatemala Menchú has survived the controversy that sought to besmirch her image, she has gained a negative 105 5 After the Controversy: Lessons Learned about Subalternity and the Indigenous Subject public perception in the United States, and her persona has been stripped of agency here. This iconic transmutation of Menchú 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 reestablished , 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.2 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 Menchú controversy is not one about what she said, that part of it is an imaginary act. Rather, it is a symbolic lesion about the unwillingness of hegemonic intellectuals to listen to subaltern ones. In “The Battle of Rigoberta,” Stoll states that he remains adamantly convinced that Menchú’s story is simply the EGP’s version of events. An a priori 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—in Stoll’s understanding of this event—the students’ slogans on the eve of his death amid the flames that engulfed the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. In his chapter of The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy , Stoll says: “The story that [Menchú] 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 know are being killed for reasons we don’t understand”(392, my emphasis). From this quote it is all too clear that if we are Guatemalans, or even nonwhite Americans, we cannot connect with Stoll’s imperial “we.” It is a noninclusive pronoun from which all those to whom this is not “another” conflict but a do-or-die home affair, and certainly not a “far-off” one, are excluded, a fair-enough assumption in a local newspaper or a supermarket tabloid, but unacceptable in an academic publication.3 Given that Stoll jumps from the previous quote to a rhetorical question in which he asks himself whether Menchú’s version was the inevitable response of all Guatemala’s poor to the symptoms of oppression, we can safely conclude that his stake lies in undermining what he perceives to be...

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