Quote by Rigoberta Menchú: “My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.”

Individual suffering under oppression is never purely private — it reflects and contains the wider experience of an entire community. Menchú insisted that telling her own story was a political act, because her life could not be separated from the collective life of Guatemala's indigenous Mayan people.

I, Rigoberta Menchú was published in 1983 while Guatemala's military dictatorship was carrying out systematic massacres of Mayan villages in the highlands. The Guatemalan civil war would not end until 1996, and Menchú spent these years in exile, speaking internationally about what her community was enduring.

Guatemalan indigenous rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who survived the brutal repression of Guatemala's civil war, which killed members of her family. Her 1983 testimony I, Rigoberta Menchú brought international attention to the genocide against Mayan communities.