The autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu" is a complicated text--the conditions of its production, the complexity of its subject matter, and the wide range of possible responses among North American readers create challenges for composition students and instructors. A week of taped interviews with Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Indian whose native language is a dialect of Quiche, yielded a 500-page text in Spanish, peppered with native Quiche terms. The text relating the atrocities committed by Guatemalan troops was then edited, reorganized, cut, and broken into chapters, and later translated into English. A composition instructor introduces the complications of the text by using supplementary texts, including a documentary film, to familiarize the students with the situation in Guatemala. Students then complete a series of reading assignments and writing assignments. The instructor often confronts students with their misappropriations of Menchu's text. Some students (and writing critics) go to extremes of either complete identification with her or complete exoticization of her. Students also tend to ignore Menchu's radical Marxist politics. Students are asked to do truly critical reading by questioning their assumptions about the stability of meaning in a given text and in a world they know chiefly through texts. An annotated list of six selected resource materials, journal writing assignments, the midterm exam based on the text, and in-class writing activities are attached. Contains 7 references.) (RS)