In the following essay, Janet Varner Gunn examines the ethics of reading Third World autobiographies in the context of Rigoberta Menchú's autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú. Varner Gunn discusses the narrative form of both the autobiography and the more collective form of "testimony" as presented in Menchú's work.

I'll never forget the first time I stood in front of a university classroom in the fall of 1966. It was packed with the composition students I would be teaching as a part-timer at a large urban campus in Chicago. Names like Mary Ellen Arpino, Lois Leposky, Joan Krishko, and Ron Sigada reminded me of my own classmates back in the Western Pennsylvania mining town where I was born. Part of the Anglo-Saxon minority in Portage, I had grown up feeling both superior to and excluded from the Italian and Eastern European Catholics whose lives I...