Cultural Resources: Guatemala: I, Rigoberta Menchú
Cultural Resources: Guatemala: I, Rigoberta Menchú
Cultural Resources: Guatemala: I, Rigoberta Menchú
Time Among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico by Ronald Wright
The Maya of Central America have been called the Greeks of the New World. In
the first millennium A.D. they created the most intellectually and artistically
advanced civilization of the Americas. In ensuing centuries, as neighboring
empires fell in warfare and the Spanish Invasion, the Maya endured, shaken but
never destroyed.
Ronald Wright’s journey through time and space takes him not only to the lands
of the ancient Maya but also among the five million people who speak Mayan
languages and preserve a Mayan identity today. Embracing history, politics,
anthropology, and literature, Time Among the Maya is both a fascinating travel
memoir and the study of a civilization. (from the back cover, recommended by
Laura Hofer’s husband)
Of special interest are her descriptions of the interactions among the diverse
ethnic groups of Guatemala, her account of Quiche Mayan religious beliefs and
practices, and her descriptions of such everyday activities as making tortillas.
Particularly fascinating is her account of how Guatemalan revolutionaries
interpreted parts of the Bible in order to aid their struggle; at the end of Chapter
XVII she describes the Bible as the "main weapon" of her comrades.
Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll
In 1992, a Guatemalan peasant named Rigoberta Menchú received the Nobel
Peace Prize for her work in pressing the civil rights claims of her country's
indigenous peoples. A decade earlier, her memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchú, had
appeared, and it was immediately welcomed in the nascent canon of multicultural
literary and anthropological writings that has since become standard in the
academy. In that memoir, Menchú gives a highly specific account of the then-
ruling military government's war against tribal, rural people, making claims that
she held a leadership role in the resistance, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. In a
work certain to incite controversy, Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll
questions the veracity of those claims, interviewing many of the people who
appeared in her memoir and offering contrary testimony. His findings, Stoll
notes, do not discount the real violence visited by the Guatemalan government on
its subjects.
http://www.enjoyguatemala.com/
http://www.quetzalnet.com/Tourism.html