Cutting Out Their Tongue: Translated Mujeres’ Testimonios

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Tensions Between What We Know and What We Do: Research Praxis in Higher Education

Abstract

Ruth Behar (1993) writes and translates las historias de Esperanza and crosses the border with her stories from Spanish to English, from Mexico to the United States, from comadres speaking with each other to academic settings. What gets lost in translation? As the purveyor, how do I replicate what I know is unjust and still meet the expectations from academia—translating Latina mothers’ testimonios—losing meaning, cutting out their tongues and piecing them back together to be read en ingles.

Testimonio, a critical Latin American oral tradition practice, links “the spoken word to social action and privileges the oral narrative of personal experience as a source of knowledge, empowerment, and political strategy for claiming rights and bringing about social change” (Benmayor et al., 1997, p. 153). Testimonio bridges generations of displaced and fractured communities across time. Testimonios also serve to preserve knowledge[s] that is/are not learned in schools to illuminate and preserve our epistemic and pedagogical community tools and assets. Testimonio exemplifies Chicana/Latina feminista epistemology and pedagogy (Delgado Bernal et al., 2006) and attempts to situate the researcher-participant in reciprocal relationships where genuine connections are made between “academic” and community members. The use of testimonio to “collect data” and to share stories of survival allows for collectivity and deeper amistad and connection between participant and researcher. These interactions allow Chicana and Latina researchers to become vulnerable observers (Behar, 1996), vulnerable portraitists (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983), and reflexive insiders/outsiders (Hill Collins, 2000). As a reflexive researcher, I have arrived at uncomfortable reflexivity—that locality where I recognize that I, in fact, perpetuated and replicated traición as I became the translator, interlocutor, the bridge, Malintzin, between their voice and the [re]presentation of their lived experiences (Pillow, 2003). The testimonios written in Spanish by the Latina mothers in my ethnographic study (Flores Carmona, 2010), become; “Stories born again in an alien tongue…. An historia thrice born in translation” (Behar, 1993, pp. 17-18).

Testimonio as methodology and pedagogy has potential to serve as reciprocal processes of exchange and expand participating, teaching, learning, and researching approaches in Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. While testimonio guides us to hear organic intellectuals’ knowledge—not privileged historically or lost because of language barriers—how do we prevent cutting out tongues when we translate them?

Through their testimonio, mothers were able to bear witness to experiences on both sides of the US-Mexico border and crossing the border. These teachings on survival and cultural-familial practices are pedagogical tools that are used by Latina mothers. They construct meaning from these cultural tools as they "become part of their cultural or collective resources" and then pass them on to younger generations (Valdez, manuscript in progress, pp. 8-9). The Latina mothers learned from their mothers and now their children are part of this reciprocal exchange of education and educación across, at least, three generations. Through this paper, I explore concerns and issues with and in the [re]presentation of participants’ testimonios translated from Spanish to English in research.

Author

• Judith Flores Carmona, Hampshire College