, I Rigoberta Mench , An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Verso, 1984 (edit by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray).
I, Rigoberta Mench is the biographical account of the winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Mench of Guatemala. The story of her life is the story of the struggle of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala to maintain a way of life, even just to survive against the realities of a modern world. Wanting nothing more than to live life on their own terms, the Indian people found themselves at the mercy of large land-owners who was them as nothing but cheap tools to use for their own enrichment, yet to engage the government in efforts for reform would involve them in the Cold War struggle between U.S.-backed ruthless dictatorships and the communist backed guerilla insurgencies prevalent throughout Latin America after World War II.
To escape the poverty and struggles of life as a finca (plantation) worker, Rigoberta's father had moved to the Altiplano and begun farming the land and establishing a homestead in 1960 at a time when land was still available, though for a fee, from the Guatemalan government under land reforms established under the administration of President Arbenz. Unfortunately it Arbenz had leaned a little to far toward the communist camp, and had been deposed and times were changing1. It was only a few short years later that even the Altiplano was affected by development as land-owners claimed more and more territory for their estates. .
As more land was claimed by the fincas, the area workable by the Indian population declined dramatically. Along with this loss of territory came increasing population densities as displaced families sought new land to farm. Traditional swidden farming methods, though the most efficient method of utilizing tropical soils, require large amounts of territory for the support of relatively few people as fields are rotated about every three years and new fields must not be adjacent to the one just abandoned2.
