I may have been sounding repetitive in the first sentence of my blogs during this term, saying that I really enjoyed the week’s reading, but this has been truly one of my favourite reads so far. Even though it was hard because of the raw ways Rigoberta described her and her family’s struggles, and sometimes overwhelming due to the fact that I had to recognize many of the privileges that I had forgotten I should not take for granted, this book has truly been a very interesting and important read. Also, when I was on the phone with my mother last week and told her about this week’s reading she recommended I did some research on her before reading this book. I am so thankful for her advice as having some further background on Rigoberta and her work as a human rights activist helped me get in tune with the book.<\/p>\n
One of the first things I would like to note about this week’s reading is the impact this novel had, beyond the obvious social matters it talks about (and I may be talking too much about Mexico in my blogposts) but this book was also hard to read for me because of the similarities I found with Mexico. There is also a great percentage of Indigenous people in Mexico, a culture Mexicans should be proud of and should take care of, nevertheless the discrimination towards them is immense. Reading about Rigoberta’s descriptions of indigenous people in Guatemala and their struggle to access education and such, reminded me an awful lot of Mexico’s situation. Nevertheless, I also think this is the very reason why this book is so important to read, the awareness and even uncomfortable reminder that indigenous people in Latin America suffer from this injustice is crucial for people to know about.<\/p>\n
Another thing that was really interesting to me was that after the injustice both her father and mother suffered, Rigoberta’s way of “rebelling” was by renouncing all these socially constructed ideas of an indigenous woman. She became a human rights activist, advocating for the communities she represented, Rigoberta showed no interest in birthing a child or marriage. I believe this also shows a different kind of strength and power, different from what we have read, where most characters were men who were “rebellious” or fighting against something.<\/p>\n
My question for the class is: What aspects about Rigoberta’s way of “fighting” back were the most interesting to you? And also, do you find it important for not only university students in a Latin American literature class but also students in general to read this book?<\/p>\n
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I may have been sounding repetitive in the first sentence of my blogs during this term, saying that I really enjoyed the week’s reading, but this has been truly one of my favourite reads so far. Even though it was hard because of the raw ways Rigoberta described her and her family’s struggles, and sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95238,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[40,38,37,36,39,35],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","tag-activism","tag-justice","tag-menchu","tag-rigoberta","tag-social-problems","tag-week-10"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/spanish312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}