I, Rigoberta Menchú
by Rigoberta Menchú
A Maya woman testifies to a genocide in progress.
For you if
you want to understand the Guatemalan genocide through the testimony of someone who survived it and refused to stay silent
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Menchú is a K'iche' Maya woman from Guatemala who gave this testimony in 1982 to the Venezuelan anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. It describes her childhood in the highlands, the systematic violence of the Guatemalan military against Indigenous communities, the murder of her father at the Spanish embassy massacre, the torture and killing of her brother, the disappearance of her mother. She was 23 when she gave this testimony. The book won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Controversial in some details but essential as a dispatch from inside the Guatemalan genocide that the US government funded and the world mostly ignored.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Guatemala
- Voice
- Written by a Guatemalan author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
The Look of Silence(2014)
dir. Joshua Oppenheimer
He asks the men who killed his brother to face it.
An optometrist whose older brother was murdered in Indonesia's 1965–66 mass killings decides to break decades of enforced silence — visiting the men responsible, still powerful in his community, under the guise of an eye exam, and asking them to take responsibility.
Why it’s here: Punk in an optometrist's quiet act of defiance — Adi gives the men who killed his brother an eye exam and asks each to own what they did, in a country where they still hold power. Pedagogical in showing how impunity is kept in place by silence and school-taught propaganda, and what breaking it costs one family.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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She took her name back from the case.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
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Locked in a bathroom while history happened.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Inconvenient Indian
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North America's relationship with Native people, undisguised.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
