Rigoberta Menchu book review
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I, Rigoberta Mench: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
Rigoberta Mench won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her non-violent activist work toward the cause of the Guatemalan working peasants. The indigenous workers in Guatemala were very poor and discriminated against in the 60s and 70s, which was the time in which Rigoberta Mench grew up. Most of the poor workers were also from some form of Mayan Indians, Mestizos and Ladinos or a mixture of other people of Spanish descent. Mench was a Quiche Indian, and she stood up for all her people, including all the 23 other ethnicities of the peasants in Guatemala at that time. She joined a union for peasant workers, and they had numerous activist events to work toward equality for the Guatemalans.
Guatemala in itself was such a diverse country before the Spanish arrived. With just the 23 different indigenous ethnicities within the branch off of the original Mayan Indians, different cultures and customs were already very different from each other. Then after the Spanish came, the cultures became even more varied, and added an element of superiority which then emerged into a more structured class system. Mench talked about how her younger image of the ladinos were that they were all bad people, but then her image of them later changes and she realizes she can not categorize all ladinos in this stereotype. For example, in the finca they worked for a master who was very politically and economically powerful...