Who is Rigoberta Menchu?
I first encountered her name in the Stanford multicultural curriculum while I was researching my first book Illiberal Education. Interestingly one Stanford professor described Rigoberta as a “quadruple victim” of oppression. That’s right, a quadruple victim. She was a person of color and a victim of racism, a woman and a victim of sexism, a South Central American (thank you, commenters) and a victim of North American colonialism, and a Mayan of Indian descent and hence oppressed by the light-skinned ruling class of Guatemala. Rigoberta’s harrowing tale of victim hood is eloquently told in her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchu. The only problem is that many of the actual details in that book are made up. Rigoberta tells of how the military killed her brother, but the New York Times found her brother alive and well and living in a neighboring town. Rigoberta describes how the Guatemalan right-wing military seized her family’s land, but the mayor of her town said that her parents were act
