SOURCE: Burgos, Elizabeth. “The Story of a Testimonio.” Latin American Perspectives 26, no. 6 (November 1999): 53–63.

In the following essay, Burgos, the editor of I, Rigoberta Menchú, describes how she came to know Menchú and how she handled the transcription and development of the material that appeared in the book.

A zeal for transcendence was the sentiment Rigoberta Menchú transmitted to me at our first meeting in Paris one January afternoon in 1982. She was accompanied by Marie Tremblay, a Canadian doctor and collaborator of the guerrilla group Organización del Pueblo en Armas (Organization of the People in Arms—ORPA). To understand our encounter, one has to go back to another, also in January, but in the year 1966, during the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. The aim of the Tricontinental had been to coordinate the armed struggle on the three continents in what was then known as the Third World: Asia, Africa...