¡Hay que hablar! Testimonio in the Everyday Lives of Migrant Mothers

• In Event: Toward a Humanizing Study of Language in Use Among Nondominant Children, Youth, and Their Families

Abstract

This paper examines how two undocumented mothers both rehearse for and perform the act of giving testimonio, and the significance of the ethnographer’s role in recording and disseminating these narratives. The analysis identifies discursive and semiotic features of testimonio used by the mothers and the researcher to develop an emergent narrative form situated within an increasingly anti-immigrant context.

The interdisciplinary theoretical framework integrates perspectives from literary criticism, Chicana feminist epistemology, and language socialization to draw our attention to the formal and political attributes of testimonio. Testimonio is a narrative form that details an individual’s participation in a community-wide struggle for human and civil rights. This paper draws our attention to the interactional accomplishment of testimonio to highlight the socializing potential of the narrative form in the context of mixed-status families and to underscore the way in which recording and sharing testimonio as part of the ethnographic research process can serve to counter the criminalizing and dehumanizing discourses now dominant in the U.S.

The paper draws from a twenty-three month ethnographic study of four mixed-status Mexican families recruited through the ‘snowball method’ (Ritchie et al., 2003). The author conducted participant observation in public spaces, the families’ homes, and neighborhood schools. Over forty-five hours of interactions were recorded in the homes, field notes were taken for each visit, and artifacts such as school documents, children’s drawings, and pamphlets distributed at grassroots meetings were collected. Field notes and video logs were coded for grammatical patterns, recurring topics, and themes in the participants’ speech and then triangulated (Goetze and LeCompte, 1981) with other data including interviews and artifacts. Conversation Analysis transcription methods focused attention on the ways that ideas referenced through talk developed over the course of unfolding social interactions (Schegloff, 2007).

The author presents two key findings: first, that giving testimonio is a symbolic and strategic substitute for participation in a legal system that affords migrants certain due process rights but denies them the civil rights afforded U.S. citizens; second, that testimonio presents unique opportunities for researchers to learn from and work in solidarity with migrant populations.


This paper takes up a call for researchers to examine the ways in which their participation in research contexts can constitute a form of “worthy witnessing” in which the researcher both observes and works in solidarity with the communities they research (Winn & Ubiles, 2010, p. 293). This focus on testimonio positions mothers as active subjects and not just objects of study, and strives for a more interactional ethnographic approach that challenges that static observer/observed dichotomy. This paper shows how attending to language use in daily interactions allows us to better understand the ways in which migrant women co-construct emerging funds of knowledge and socialize one another to new forms of political participation. Educational anthropologists have a central role to play in scholarly and grassroots communities, as well as an obligation to consider both the possibilities and constraints of this academic-activist approach.

Author

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Rutgers University