MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the classic text, I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984), published in Spanish a year earlier as Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), which largely founds the genre of the Latina testimonio text in Latin American literary criticism, the transcriber of Menchú’s testimony, Elisabeth Burgos, explains, “A relationship based upon food proves that there are areas where Indians and non-Indians can meet and share things: the tortillas and black beans brought us together because they gave us the same pleasure and awakened the same drives in both of us” (2009, xvii). Since the testimonial genre itself depends on the empathies established between the testifier and the transcriber, food becomes foundational to the generation of testimony. In other words, food helps to initiate dialogue between the testifier and the transcriber and, further, provides a common foundation of familiarity amidst unfamiliarity, in this case between Menchú, a poor indigenous woman from Guatemala, and Burgos, her bourgeois Venezuelan transcriber. I thus argue that food becomes the language through which and with which the Latina testimonial is shared. As food is consumed in conversation with one another, it becomes the symbolic sign—in semiotic terms—communicated between the women, just as their words are exchanged in the dialogues that form the very basis of their testimonial. Food connects these women and their worlds, simultaneously with their words. In the context of great injustice—for Menchú, the systematic oppression and genocide of her people—Latina women have often struggled to eat in order to live, but in living, or surviving, on a sustenance of maize—a highly symbolic sign of indigenous culture—they live to tell their stories, to share in the dialogic testimonio, just as food in their cultures is shared and consumed in communal fashion.