Testimonios de Campesinas: Personal-Political-Biographical Narratives of Immigrant Women’s Lives

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

Abstract

Testimonios de Campesinas are recountings of life-stories in which intersections of power and privilege are marked in every step. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in the year 2009, one in five people was either a first or second generation US resident (70 million) (US Census Bureau, 2012). Of those, about 12 million were un-authorized, undocumented immigrants (Hoefer, Rytina, & Baker, 2012). Testimonios de Campesinas tell stories that clearly illustrate how legal immigration status not only defines social space and opportunities, but more importantly, how it restricts basic human rights and creates an under-class, an un-authorized, un-documented population with no legal rights or legal protection. Within this population, gender occupies a central space as it is the reason for continuous abuse and discrimination. Violence against women is prevalent.

As a qualitative researcher, the choice of using poetic narrative as methodology allows me to trace the risky expeditions, literal and metaphoric, undertaken by campesinas which bring to life a complicated cartography composed of the multiple death-defying journeys women--immigrant or not--take in their ordinary lives (Ellis, 2012). Using life story interviews of campesina women as “data,” the poems are testimonios emerging out of a larger research project centered on the lives of campesina women working in the fields of the Southeast in the USA. These testimonios weave the familiar and extraordinary embodied in women’s lives. However, “[testimonios are] disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated” (Felman & Laub, 1991, p. 159‎). Of relevant “findings,” these stories depict the dreams, hopes, violence, and danger associated with their journey while crossing the Mexican/USA border as well as the trauma of living restricted lives with full awareness (Anzaldúa, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Spencer, 2009) of having no legal rights or legal protection.

My hope when sharing these testimonios is for the reader to better understand its societal role and how much, the self and the other are intertwined. As a qualitative researcher and as an educator, I believe that giving a humane face to the numeric data will help increasing awareness about power, privilege, and praxis in making political the personal and biographical stories.

References

Anzaldua, G. (2012). Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (4th ed). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Felman, S. & Laub, D. (1991). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: NY: Routledge, 1991.

Hoefer, M., Rytina, N. & Baker, B. (2012, March). US Department of Homeland Security. 1 April 2012 .

Latina Feminist Group. Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latin America Otherwise)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Spener, D.. (2009). Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

US Census Bureau. "2010 Census." 2012. United States Census 2010. 1 April 2012 .

Author

• Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto, The University of Texas - Brownsville