Postcolonial Complications of Supremacy, Privilege, and Personal Praxis in Testimonio and Corrido Hispanophone Traditions

• In Event: Testimonio as Curriculum and Pedagogy: Toward an Understanding of Hispanophone Cultural and Educational Traditions

Abstract

In this paper, I explore what it means to situate pedagogy and curriculum inquiry within the border testimonio tradition of corrido.

Toward that end, the primary goal of this presentation is to use the narrative form of corrido as an interpretive space in which to: 1) Explore testimonio as a curricular practice that links folkloric border traditions with larger intellectual traditions of Latin America and the Global South in order to navigate shifting epistemological “borders” of identity, culture and curriculum theory and 2) Identify the challenges and possibilities of using testiomonio as a glocalized, feminist pedagogy, particularly across linguistic and cultural subjectivities.

Drawing on ethnographic methods of informal interviews, participant observation conducted with teachers, students, parents and administrators, and other data gathered from doctoral level seminar classes all in the Lower Rio Grande Valley from 2009 to 2013, this paper focuses on the complexities (in terms of power, privilege and supremacy) of conducting narrative inquiry as an Anglo woman enlisting an “Hispanophone tradition of cultural and educational criticism” (Jupp, 2013) designed, in part, to critique Anglo encroachment. Further, this paper critically examines “the complex relationship between cultures and discourses that produce the speaking subject,” and, in the case of corrido, the singing subject (Klahn, 2003, p. 116). Further still, this paper explores the challenges and possibilities of leading Hispanic/Latin@ doctoral students to and through a variety of narrative traditions of the self, such as testimonio, autobiography, phenomenology, personal life-history and autoethnography as part of a glocalized, feminist pedagogy aimed at treating these perspectives “not as subjugated or disruptive knowledges, but as primary and constitutive of a different world” (Harsock, 1971, p.171). What might it mean to use narrative as a pedagogical practice aimed at understanding curriculum through multiple positionalities of difference “marked by a legacy of colonization, diasporic displacement and continued racism” alongside the complicated legacies of Latin American intellectual traditions as well as those of the Global South (Klahn, 2003, p. 116)? Such questions point to an “expressive complex of quasi-colonialism” and the ways that complexity becomes embodied in bodies of knowledge via how we conceptualize curriculum, as well as the pedagogical and research traditions with which we align (Limón, 1998, p. 110-111).

References

Harsock, N. (1990). Foucault on power: A theory for women? In L.J. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (pp.157-175). New York: Routledge.

Jupp, J.C. (2013). Toward cosmopolitan sensibilities in U.S. curriculum studies: A synoptic rendering of the Franciscan tradition in Mexico. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29(1), 48-71

Klahn, N. (2003). Literary (re)mappings: Autobiographical (dis)placements by Chicana writers. In G.F. Arredondo, A. Hurtado, N. Klahn,
O. Nájera-Ramírez, & P. Zavela (Eds.), Chicana feminisms: A critical reader (pp. 114-125). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Limón, J.E. (1998). American encounters: Greater Mexico and the erotics of culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

Author

• Laura M. Jewett, The University of Texas - Brownsville