Corrido and the Curricular Copresence of Testimonio

• In Event: 49.027 - Advancing Testimonio in Curriculum Theory: Hispanophone-Subaltern-Indigenous Cultural Traditions in International Contexts

Abstract

In this paper, I explore what it means to use the narrative form of corrido and the co-presence of testimonio as an interpretive space in which I explore the ways in which curriculum studies as an intellectual tradition and pedagogical practice might be bounded as well as enlivened.

Toward these ends, this paper draws on and problematizes data from five years of document analysis, participant observation, as well as formal and informal interviews aimed at considering the postcolonial, curricular value of the “excess of meanings” that “living in-betweeness” can give rise to, in tandem with folkloric/intellectual traditions of corrido as they flow through often contested epistemological borders of the Lower Rio-Grande Valley (Jaramillo, 2012, p. 11). This paper makes use of the etymological and social roots of corrido (to run in-between or flow through) to critically explore corrido as a form of testimonio as phenomenological curricular practice that runs or flows through epistemological in-between spaces of transnational educational research and pedagogy. What might it mean to use corrido as a form of testmonio that serves as:

1.pedagogical practice aimed at understanding and acting upon historical narratives 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).

2.“diasporic co-presence” (Clifford (1997); Pérez Firmat (2003) that challenges an “expressive complex of quasi-colonialism” that straddles epistemological, historical and geographical borderlands of US/Mexico imaginaries (Limón, 1998, p. 110-111).

3.“critical recuperation” of testiomonio as a critical curricular project of world— as well as self— making (Nance, 2006, p. 9).

References

Clifford, J. (1997). Routes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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

Jaramillo, N. E. (2012). Immigration and the challenge of education. New York, NY: Palgrave.

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.

Nance, K.A. (2006). Can literature promote justice? Trauma narrative and social action in Latin American testimony. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Pérez Firmat, G. (2003). Tongue ties: Logo-eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic literature. New York, NY: Palgrave.

Author

• Laura M. Jewett, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley