Call to Action: Speaking to Educators on the Praxis of Testimonio and the Nopal Metaphor

• In Event: 53.081 - Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 53.081-5 - Radical Storytelling and Creative Resistance: Exploring Testimonio as Theory and Praxis

Abstract

Testimonio is the intentional and rhetorical act of speaking and sharing one’s story, history or narrative with a specific focus towards that which is experienced in and around issues of bias, prejudice, oppression, otherness, marginalization, resistance, and survival (Bernal, Burciaga, & Carmona, 2012; Reyes & Rodríguez, 2012). In doing so it is also the practice of attempting to raise a critical consciousness by depicting the ways in which we are interconnected among related and seemingly unrelated narratives (Bernal et al., 2012). With roots in “oral cultures and in Latin American human rights struggles” and Chicana/Latina movements (Bernal et al., 2012, p. 363) testimonio is a process, product and pedagogy where “we are able to hear and read each other’s stories…with the goal of achieving new conocimientos, or understandings” (p. 367). Listening towards reflection and action are also fundamental to testimonio (Espino, Vega, Rendón, Ranero, & Muñiz, 2012; Reyes & Rodríguez, 2012). Reyes and Rodriguez (2012) further suggest that an objective of testimonio is to flourish critical listening and reflection as a means towards liberation (p. 527).

The particular positioning of the audience/listener/observer is what Cruz (2012) identifies as an opportunity to “travel,” where the “listener or an audience member is given the opportunity to become complicit as an observer and as a witness…[w]ithin this methodology of travel, it is important to contextualize testimonio in a critical multiculturalism that is concerned with the praxis of anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies” (p. 462). Thus, it is not enough to simply hear, but one must be willing to (at least philosophically and critically) re-make hegemonic notions that fostered the realities of these testimonios to begin with. Negron-Gonzalez (2009) reminds that conceptualizing hegemony and a narrative of counter-hegemony, is a continual process of making and re-making sense—“that consciousness is also dynamic and ever-changing. One of the key ways that this tension is worked out is through the personal-political practice of testimonios” (Negron-Gonzalez, 2009, p. 32).

The author utilizes testimonio and explicates the critical role educators embody as interrupters of systemic supremacy and racism through their communicative behaviors in a classroom. Pineau (1998) depicts the classroom as “spatial and temporal sites where bodies rub up against one another literally and metaphorically. Despite our best efforts to inhabit that space democratically, our bodies always, already, are molded by our different social and institutional status” (p. 131). The professor/educator as facilitator faces an immense task in working towards a holistic pedagogy as they teach towards equity within the classroom and beyond. These actions of making and re-making to teach away from marginalization, otherness, and towards inclusion is “[t]eaching as a performative act” (hooks, 1994, p. 11) and thus necessary for the success of anti-oppressive pedagogies.

Author

• Vincent Chandler, City College of San Francisco