SOURCE: McFayden, Deidre. Review of Crossing Borders, by Rigoberta Menchú. Progressive 62, no. 10 (October 1998): 42–43.

In the following review, McFayden argues that Menchú's second autobiography, Crossing Borders, is stale and disappointing in comparison to I, Rigoberta Menchú.

Noble Prize–winner Rigoberta Menchú first gained prominence in the United States with the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), her riveting account of the destruction of her family and community during the darkest years of the Guatemalan dictatorship.

The product of a week-long marathon of interviews with anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-Debray in Paris, that book is equal parts ethnography and autobiography. Menchú starts with her earliest memories of riding with her parents in a crowded, foul-smelling truck to the coffee plantations on the coast. She tells how both parents and a brother were savagely murdered by the Guatemalan military. And she explains how, at the age of twenty-three...