In I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), Menchu does not recount her traumatic past to retraumatize herself or emphasize her status as a helpless, powerless victim of indiscriminate violence, economic exploitation, torture, and aggression committed by her ruthless oppressors and the Guatemalan military. Instead, Menchu vividly shows her postcolonial power to politically reappropriate her “imperfect Spanish,” “silence,” and “lies” in order to achieve the urgent aims she has in mind in her testimony. Speaking in a public, collective voice of marginalized groups such as Indians and women in her testimony, Menchu, with a clear political awareness, politicizes her personal trauma so as to salvage Mayan culture and end the massacre of her indigenous community. Menchu believes that telling traumatic stories of the poor, disenfranchised, and dispossessed people of Guatemala to the world will bring about social justice and change across the globe. Thus, standing as a representative of these disempowered people, she situates her trauma in a political-social context, rather than putting it in a personal memory. By politicizing her trauma and transcending the position of just being a witness to events in her testimony, she reforms herself as a brave, dauntless fighter, who lays bare and disseminates the truth about the infringements upon the human rights of silenced indigenous peoples of not only Latin America, but of the whole world. In this way, Menchu’s testimonial narrative can have an enormous international impact on the national, ethnic, and gender liberation of people who are discriminated against, marginalized, and silenced all around the world.