Barry Flynn

    From Stanford to Columbia, professors continue to require college students to read a text by a Nobel Peace Prize winner that was revealed as a hoax. An alarming number of falsehoods were discovered by Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll last year in I, Rigoberta, Menchu, a narrative of life as a Guatemalan peasant that is widely assigned in college classes. Many in higher education have scrambled to make excuses for the book and condemn the researcher who uncovered its falsehoods.

    Arlene Diaz of Indiana University, who uses the work in both her Latin American history and her gender courses, told Campus Report that the deception and generalities don’t “undermine the situation of Indian women and men in Guatemala,” so she will keep assigning the book because it is consistent with furthering her objectives. Diaz maintained, “I will continue to use her work. The students love to hear about her. We even use her movie sometimes.” 

    Professor Jeff Gould, who requires the book in his IU history classes, suggested that incorporating the experiences of others into a personal narrative is not so unusual. Gould contended that the traditions of indigenous people “involve more of a collective biography, rather than a strict adherence to norms,” that he said are attributed to works in the United States and Europe. 

    This approach echoes what John Peeler of Bucknell suggested. Peeler assigns the book and holds, “the Latin American tradition of the testimonial has never been bound by the strict rules of veracity that we take for granted.” 

    The method of “incorporation” to which professors Gould and Peeler refer is how Rigoberta describes what she perceives to be happening to her people on the whole. The vagaries and double-talk of these professors offer are very creative ways of granting Rigoberta a license to lie. Many professors who stand by Rigoberta use this explanation, despite the fact that I, Rigoberta Menchu is promoted to students as a first person narrative. 

    As The Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out in January, Stoll’s work hit the academic world like a bomb, leaving many professors looking for a way to discredit him. This is odd considering that Stoll is a leftward leaning academic himself and an expert on Latin American culture. Nonetheless he has elicited epithets of “reactionary” and “racist” from the campus left that embraces Menchu’s work. Many professors feel the investigation conducted by Stoll was unfair. Some anthropologists have even argued that it is not correct to question third-world voices at all, particularly when they further a “good” cause. 

    At the University of California-Davis, Campus Report found that Menchu’s story is still widely embraced in English, history, and Native American studies departments. History professor Charles Walker said he thinks Stoll undertook a rather strict study of Rigoberta. “I don’t know too many people who can hold up to the sort of analysis that Stoll carried out,” said Walker. “His argument that …Rigoberta has to be unblemished is ridiculous.” Although he remains sympathetic to Menchu’s story, Walker, unlike many professors, “won’t just dismiss Stoll as some reactionary or odd ball,” without reading his work. 

    While Walker’s sentiment might be reassuring to hear, there are many professors who have not taken the time to honestly look into Stoll’s findings. Professor Gould admited not reading Stoll’s work, but maintains that Menchu’s “voice is quite important and relevant regardless.” Professor Diaz conceded, “I have not read the book that this person [Stoll] wrote.” But she went on to explain, “Even though there is a mistake here and there, it does not undermine the situation.” This obstinacy points to the unwillingness of many professors to let go of an ideologically effective tract that they find in I, Rigoberta Menchu. 

    Best exemplifying this academic stubbornness and indifference to evidence is Wellesley College Professor Marjorie Agonsin. The professor at the all-female college  told The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, “Whether her book is true or not, I don’t care.” She went on to suggest, “I think Rigoberta Menchu has been used by the Right to negate the very important space that multiculturalism is providing in academia.” Professor Agonsin further contended that we should “teach our students about the Guatemalan military.” 

    Still, other professors interviewed by Campus Report will present Rigoberta’s text in a more even-handed way. At the University of Illinois, where Rigoberta’s story is commonly used, Professor Nils Jacobson assigns I, Rigoberta Menchu only in conjunction with the latest allegations and along with some viewpoints that differ from Menchu’s. Although he doesn’t think the allegation of genocide against the Mayan people is overblown, he does believe that Stoll has raised some valid questions.

    Likewise, Professor Herbert Braun of the University of Virginia has a similar approach to teaching her story. He suggested that there is somewhat of a one-sided perspective when dealing with Rigoberta in the classroom. While he did concede a dilemma, he said he will continue to teach I, Rigoberta Menchu in his history courses but with a disclaimer of sorts. This approach, while it could shed some light on Rigoberta’s fabrications, demonstrates how some professors still cling to a discredited text.

    Professor Tim Brook of Stanford’s anthropology department doesn’t think Menchu’s book is discredited at all. As he told The Stanford Review last spring, “Authenticity and reliability are problems in all texts.” Brook went on to say, “This controversy does not inauthenticate Menchu’s book.” He adds that the controversy encourages him to now require the book. 
A glimpse at Stoll’s work will show that in her tale, Rigoberta puts forth a work of fiction that offers one-sided Marxist world views on the Guatemalan civil war, rather than the historical and biographical work it purports to be. 

    For instance, toward the end of I, Rigoberta Menchu, readers are given a gut wrenching account of the torture that her brother had to endure leading up to his being doused with gasoline and then being lit ablaze. Her parents, Rigoberta says, witnessed him being burnt to death. Yet this incident never occurred. Stoll discovered this early on, and a follow up New York Times inquiry backs this up. As far as being one of her “collective truths” that her apologists assert, that is not likely either as torching bodies like this never took place where she lived.

    Another more moving scene in I, Rigoberta Menchu is when her brother Nicholas finally succumbs to malnutrition and dies. Yet no family members recall Nicholas ever passing away. In fact, Nicholas is alive and well to this very day.

    What is described as oppression by wealthy European landowners against the future Nobel Prize winner’s father turns out to be a land dispute between her dad, who owned a great deal of land, and other peasants. Most villagers Stoll spoke with remember the conflict as one in which Menchu’s father took advantage of other indigenous peasants. Court records and personal recollections verify this version of events. 

    Even seemingly trivial matters are lied about in the story. From the very start of the book, Rigoberta leads on that she was illiterate and monolingual. As she affirmed, “I must say before I start that I never went to school and so I find speaking Spanish very difficult.” But she attended two respectable boarding schools that were run by nuns, where she spoke and wrote Spanish and Mayan very well.

    When asked to respond to these cited falsehoods Rigoberta has answered vaguely and in a quite bizarre fashion. When her second book came out in 1997, (it was more up-front in its billing as a “part memoir, part political manifesto”) she disassociated herself from the translator of her first book, Marxist scholar Elizabeth Burgos-Dubray, by saying I, Rigoberta Menchu was “not a work that belongs to me.” Giving a speech in January of this year, Rigoberta proclaimed that she was entitled to her own memories, and that criticism of her was the work of reactionaries. And on the matter of her brother Nicholas who turned out not to have died from malnutrition, she says that she had another brother named Nicholas!

    Perhaps most important of all of Rigoberta’s falsehoods—and what is a central part of David Stoll’s work—is Rigoberta’s description of the political and military climate of her region. She stresses that her  people were frightened by the government army while she does not offer the counter distinction that they were also terrified by the Marxist guerilla rebels. The indigenous people that Rigoberta spoke about were caught in the crossfire of two armies. While the government army was the stronger force, the guerilla movement was notorious for introducing political assassination to the villages. As Stoll maintains, she drastically revised her village’s experience by suggesting that the objectives of the guerilla movement were also widely embraced by the native people. Stoll offers that they were not.

    From the false portrayal put forth here, Rigoberta is able to craft her revolutionary tale to suit every Marxist claim throughout the rest of the story. As the introduction of I, Rigoberta Menchu maintains, the work serves as a “manifesto on behalf of an ethnic group.” But it also serves as a “manifesto” of another sort, in that it provides many professors with what they want to hear because it falls in line with every left-wing, campus concern. Defining the ultimate victim status, she embodies a triad of victimology—she is a female and thus the victim of sexism, a peasant and thus the victim of classism, and dark-skinned and thus the victim of racism. 

    Before any of the revelations came about, Rigoberta’s tome was at the center of a much publicized curriculum shift at American universities in the late ‘80s. In 1991, Dinesh D’Souza dedicated a whole chapter of his book Illiberal Education to the rise of multicultural curriculum, which he called, “Travels with Rigoberta.” D’Souza suggested that the aim of some of its proponents were rooted in political interests rather than a concern for education.

    D’Souza summed up the multicultural phenomenon by pointing to the motives of university faculty. He wrote, “the university faculty…have placed ideological prejudice at the center of their curriculum, so that students are not only deprived full exposure to the Western tradition, but they do not even get a genuine and comprehensive understanding of non-Western cultures.” He went on to state, “Colleges would promote better understanding among students, and future respect among cultures, if they taught both Western and non-Western philosophy, history, and literature in a more balanced and truthful manner.” 

    While some professors Campus Report spoke with stand by her work by attacking Stoll, others attempt to remain diplomatic by claiming not to know all of the facts. One justifies her position by explaining that students love hearing about Menchu. Still others give her a free pass. Like Eastern Michigan University Professor Allen Carey Webb, most provide excuses for Rigoberta’s lies. Webb, who is the editor of a high-school textbook on Rigoberta, complained to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “we have a higher standard of truth for poor people like Rigoberta.”