SOURCE: Sommer, Doris. “Rigoberta's Secrets.” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 1 (summer 1991): 32–50.

In the following essay on I, Rigoberta Menchú, Sommer examines the “secrets” Menchú refers to in her autobiography, studying the role that language plays in forming and preserving an ethnic and cultural identity.

It is surprising, I think, to come continually to passages in Rigoberta Menchú's testimonial where she purposely withholds information. Of course the audible protests of silence may well be responses to anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-Debray's line of questioning. If she were not asking particular questions, the Quiché informant would logically have no reason to refuse answers. From the introduction to Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (1983), we know that the testimonial is being mediated at several levels by Burgos, who records, edits and arranges the information, so that knowledge in this text announces its partiality. The book, in other words, does not presume any immediacy between the...