I, Rigoberta Menchú: The Convergence

When reading I, Rigoberta Menchú, Milton, Rousseau, Babeuf, Donnelly, Marx and Engels, Babel, Malraux, Orwell, and Azuela, converge. I, Rigoberta Menchú, in part, “reinforce” the ideologies of:

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels:

“Capitalists (the bourgeois), are owners of property, the means of production, and the exploiters of the working class, and the proletariats are the wage-laborers reduced to selling their labor in order to live.”

Ignatius Donnelly, Marx, and George Orwell:

Society’s ruling class (property owners), create an “underworld,” creating a “domain of the poor,” and that all property owners should be abolished.”

John Milton “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”:

Dismantles the divinity of the power structure and defines their role as merely “deputies of the people,” and therefore, not above reproach. They are to be challenged politically, morally, philosophically, and legally. And that the power structure is expected to act and serve for the common good of all the people.

Gracchus Babeuf, “Liberty, Equality, Freedom”:

The inequities and violation of human rights is just cause for social revolution, and that the deceitful acts of these institutions give rise to the mental and physical forces that necessitate change by community members.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract” provides the foundation for Babuef:

By combining these forces (creating a collective force), men can achieve and maintain true morality within a continuum of self-governing laws.

The events detailed further in the reading: Rigoberta learns that her father was burned to death; Rigoberta is forced to watch the burning of her brother (still alive after the soldiers mutilated his body); she is told that her mother was tortured to death; and when Rigoberta was pursued by the authorities -- Maximilian, Ch’en, Katov, Kyo, and Demetrio surface.

I, Rigoberta Menchú’s political, social, economic, and psychological landscapes unite the aforementioned ideologies that were studied in this course.

Thank you,

Edith