Abrazando Nopales: Prickly Embrace Life Stories/Testimonios of Undocumented Women's Jump(ing the Border)

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

Abstract

“….y pos, ahi nomás, caminando sin parar, sin pensar, con las manos delante, abrazando nopales…esos te hacen saber questas viva, pos que arden…queman tus brazos…ayy… las manos… y te toca desenterrar las espinas… pero que importa...así es…” (Maria testimonio, fieldnotes)

".... so… you just go…walking nonstop, without thinking, hands forward, hugging cactus ... learning that you are alive because you are burning ... those prickles burn ... your arms ... your hands ... and you get to dig up the thorns but who cares ... it is what it is… " (my translation)

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. Testimonios highlight how illegal immigration status not only defines social space and opportunities, but more importantly, how this status restricts basic human rights and creates an under-class, an un-authorized, un-documented population with no legal rights or legal protection. Within this underclass, gender functions to provide additional risks and egregious injustices.

As part of the internationalization of curriculum studies (Baldwin/Chair, Aletheiani, Price, Baldwin, Moon, & Paraskeva, 2012), the advancement of Latin American testimonio traditions provides a unique and important opening for an internationalized conversation on social justice in education. Drawing on decolonizing Latin American traditions, J. Jupp at a 2014 AERA presentation discussed Latin American educational traditions including testimonio as “complex site of historical, social, cultural, and identitarian resources for critical collective and personal study” that advance social justice in the present.

Using testimonio as research methodology and epistemology (Delgardo Bernal, 1998), I interviewed and collected life-stories of the campesinos and campesinas working in the fields of the USA-Southeast. All of the interviewees were immigrants from Latin America, and they had been in the United States between a couple weeks through thirty-five years. From these story “data,” I have chosen ten testimonios de campesinas that specifically shared their brinco into the United States. To analyze and render story data, I developed poetic performance narratives. Following Rosaldo’s ethnographic poiesis (2014), these renderings are “not to represent the event […] but to be the event itself” (p. 102). Using poetic performance narratives allows me to fulfill my obligation to safeguard and to keep alive the women’s fears, excruciating pain, dreams and hopes.

References

Baldwin, A.; Aletheiani, D.; Price, T. Moon, S. & Paraskeva, J. (2012, April). The internationalization of curriculum studies task force chair. Special session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies in Vancouver, CA.

Delgado Bernal, D. (1998) Using a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 555-583

Rosaldo, R. (2014). The Day of Shelly’s Death. The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham: Duke University Press.

Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement's Foreign-Born Population http://www.census.gov/apsd/techdoc/cps/cpsmar09.pdf >.

Author

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