Dinesh D'Souza: "3. Travels with Rigoberta Multiculturalism at Stanford"

Adapted from his book, Illiberal Education, 1991.

Pages 71-72

"Perhaps the text which best reveals the premises underlying the new Stanford curriculum is I, Rigoberta Menchu, subtitled An Indian Woman in Guatemala.

"Stanford presented this book as an epitome of the sort of new thinking that was essential in a multicultural curriculum, and it is now regularly assigned to students enrolled in this track.

"Anthropology professor Renato Rosaldo told the Christian Science Monitor that teaching books such as I, Rigoberta Menchu as part of a multicultural curriculum generated the most exciting teaching I've done in 19 years.

"Published in 1983, the book is the story of a young woman named Rigoberta Menchu growing up in Guatemala.

"As the representative of an oral tradition, Rigoberta does not write: rather her views are transcribed and translated by the French feminist writer Elisabeth Burgos - Debray.

"Much of the book simply details the mundane: Rigoberta's Tenth Birthday, Rigoberta Decides to Learn Spanish, ... are typical chapter titles.

"But integrated into the story, and impossible to miss, is the development of Rigoberta's political consciousness -- her parents are killed for unspecified reasons in a bloody massacre, reportedly carried out by the Guatemalan army, and Rigoberta vows to fight back.

"She begins to see her cause as intertwined with the struggle for self - determination of South American Indians.

"She becomes first a feminist, then a socialist, then a Marxist.

"By the end of the book Rigoberta is attending Popular Front conferences in Paris, discoursing on bourgeois youths and Molotov cocktails; there is even a chapter titled Rigoberta Renounces Marriage and Motherhood.

"Strangely, in the introduction to I, Rigoberta Menchu we learn from Burgos - Debray that Rigoberta:

"[S]peaks for all the Indians of the American continent.

"Further she represents oppressed people everywhere.

"As Burgos - Debray suggests in the introduction, Rigoberta's peasant radicalism provides independent Third World corroboration of Western progressive ideologies.

"Her usefulness to Professor Rosaldo is that Rigoberta provides a model with whom American minority and female students can identify: they too are oppressed after all.

"As it stands, she is an ecological saint, made famous by her very obscurity, elevated by her place in history as a representative voice of oppression.

"Now it is her turn to be canonized -- quite literally, for her to enter the Stanford canon [of multiculturalism, natch! :)]."

This is one author who can most certainly write...!! You bet!