Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present

Rigoberta Menchú, as famous as she became by producing autobiographical texts and winning the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, was not the first twentieth-century Mesoamerican indigenous woman to write her story. That honor belongs to doña Luz Jiménez (born Julia Jiménez Gonzalez). She worked as a model for Diego Rivera and others among the international group of artists seeking to revolutionize Mexico's art, society, and culture during the 1920s and 1930s, an example of the indigenismo (Indianism) of elite Mexican intellectuals. They celebrated Mexico's native past yet tried to suppress indigenous identities and integrate native people and communities into the new national mainstream. Jiménez authored numerous folkloric texts, and most important, wrote an autobiographic volume entitled De Porfirio Díaz a Zapata: Memoria náhuatl de Milpa Alta.¹ However, while a reader can look up the book using Luz Jiménez's name, on the title page, its compiler, Fernando Horcasitas, is credited first as the translator and editor, and doña Luz is credited second for her [Nahuatl Recollections.]

While Jiménez makes her presence felt strongly from page 1 of the book, a tension exists within the text over just whose story lies at the center of the book, doña Luz's or the town of Milpa Alta's. A similar tension can be found in Rigoberta Menchú's memoirs, especially the first volume entitled in English, I, Rigoberta Menchú, in which Menchú's own story and those of her family, her village Chimel, her people (the K'iche' Maya), and all Guatemalan Mayas compete for the reader's attention. The complexities of authorship of each of these volumes might account for the contradictory nature of each text. But maybe the compilers' choices (Horcasitas in the case of Jiménez, Elizabeth Burgos in the case of Menchú) also reflect both a popular and scholarly tendency to efface the voices of indigenous women. Such scholarly choices help to reinforce images of indigenous women, from both early and

-90-