Testimonio and Reconstituting Identity: The Curriculum and Pedagogy of Lived Testimonio

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

Abstract

This paper explores and questions what my own testimonio constructs in relation with curriculum, teaching, and learning.

Testimonio is a educational tool which can serve as a narrative form and a pedagogical method which forces its readers to confront firsthand experiences of injustice. In this exploration, I understand testimonio as a type of curriculum theorizing drawing on narrative, autobiographical, and autoethnographic traditions from Aguirre & Hurtado (2005), Anzaldua (1999), Clandinin (2007), Kincheloe & Pinar (1991), Jewett (2008), and Whitlock (2007).

Using testimonio as a mode of narrative inquiry (Nance, 2006) to confront life experiences, to bear witness to injustices, and provoke others to confront difficult knowledges, I explore an unhappy and unjust constellation of social- and historically constructed (in the public imagination) “ border violence”. This is an ongoing narrative inquiry of my own lived curriculum of border violence and displacement. I am the primary participant. This paper examines the possibilities and challenges of using testimonio as a mode of inquiry and pedagogical practice. In taking up testimonio, I draw from Acevedo et al. (2001); Beverly (2004); Nance (2006); and Padilla & Martinez, (2005) in complexifying the act of testimonio.
Regarding what are called “findings” in social science, my “findings” go beyond such vulgarities and drive toward lived experiences, incorporated identities, and possible futures. In my case, testimonio gives me a voice, and through this voice, it allows me to tell the stories of other silent border violence survivors. This is an ongoing narrative inquiry of my own lived curriculum of border violence and displacement in which my father was murdered, and my children (who found him slain) and I have to reconstitute new identities as survivors of this violence in dealing with his loss, our shame, and our abilities to reconstitute ourselves in the face of militarized border state that continues – in its operations – to provide barbaric inequalities and desperate poverty in the face of enormous wealth and so-called “Second Amendment Rights.”

As a mother, teacher, emerging scholar and wounded survivor, testimonio creates a place for the transnational complexities of my own identity, history, and future in developing the courage to continue.

References

Acevedo et al. (2001). Telling to Live. Latina Feminist Testimonios. Duke University Press.

Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera. The new mestiza. San Franscico, CA: Aunte Lute.

Beverly, J. (2005). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S.

Clandinin, J. (2007). Handbook of Narrative Inquiry, Mapping a Methodology. Sage Publications, Inc.

Jewett, L. M. (2008). A delicate dance: Autoethnography,curriculum and the semblance of intimacy. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Kincheloe, J & Pinar, W.F. (1991). Curriculum as a social psychoanalysis. The significance of place. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Nance, K. (2006). Can Literature Promote Justice? Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Whitlock, R. U. (2007) The corner of Canaan: Curriculum studies of place and the new: Reconstruction of the south. New York. Peter Lang.

Author

• Edith Espinosa Trevino, The University of Texas - Brownsville