Crossing Borders

Part memoir, part political manifesto, this impassioned testimony by the Guatemalan Maya human-rights activist and winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize is a stirring sequel to her 1984 autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu. The author, who fled Guatemala in 1980 after both her parents were murdered by a right-wing military regime, launched, while in exile in Mexico, a movement for the rights of indigenous peoples. Although she notes that Guatemala has made progress toward becoming a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society, it remains, she charges, ""a bloodthirsty, repressive, racist, dirty, backward country,"" where big landowners and the military oppress the poor and deprive native peoples of basic rights. Menchu-Tum explicates Maya customs, myths and a moral cosmology rooted in reverence for Mother Earth, writing movingly of her close relationship with her mother, who was a peasant leader, midwife and healer. Recounting her 12 years of lobbying at the U.N., she argues that that world body can become the main problem-solving force only if it gives a greater voice to nongovernmental organizations representing the dispossessed. Menchu-Tum makes a good case for the U.N.'s adoption of a proposed universal declaration to protect the world's indigenous peoples from ethnocide, massacres and discrimination. Her political agenda of equitable land distribution and struggle against racism gives her book broad appeal. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Aug.) FYI: I, Rigoberta Menchu has sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide in 13 languages.