A Testimonio From the Other California: Immigrant Life in the Central Valley and the Road Toward the Professoriate

• 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

Throughout my life I have come home to California’s San Joaquin Central Valley more times than my heart can remember. I grew up in a neighborhood mired in poverty and social ills, but I am also the product of a family and community who are holders and producers of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, 2002) with Funds of Knowledge (Gonzalez et al. 2005). Both of these realities—pain and power—and all that lay in-between characterized my upbringing. This is my testimonio—my truth-telling story—of how I learned from the sacrifices my parents made and injustices they experienced as Mexicano immigrants pursuing the dream of a better life for their children in Central Valley California; and, it is also the story of learning from my family’s knowledge, strengths, cultural resources, and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2006).

My testimonio is comprised of memories, journal entries, audio recordings, and transcripts of pláticas (talks) I’ve had over the years with my parents. I grew up learning from pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal, 2001) and through real life stories—our pláticas. My father has a love for words, storytelling, and social analysis; my mother used our talks to share sabiduría (wisdom), amor (love) y apoyo (encouragement). Testimonios are a validation of experiential knowledge; it is a person’s truth being revealed as they recount the events of injustice, violence, or exploitation, that they have experienced and witnessed (Delgado Bernal et al. 2012). Testimonio is also defined by urgency; there is a need for telling stories from the past, to reclaiming the past, to give testimony to the injustices of the past, to reinscribe local knowledge, to resist domination (Anzaldúa 1987; Latina Feminist Group, 2001 Delgado Bernal, 2001). Testimonio also “challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance” (Delgado Bernal, 2012, 363). In this way, my testimonio in not only mine, but of shared experiences, though perhaps layered, having points of contact, contradiction, and solidarity.

Like Linda Prieto (2001) I also draw strength from “memories of tears and laughter”, as a means of self love and for reimagining the educational possibilities of Latina/o immigrant youth. I used my parents pláticas to inform my educational research where I have drawn from critical pedagogies (Freire, 1970; Morrell, 2004) to document oral histories of immigration and Community Cultural Wealth curriculum (Yosso, 2006). I am no longer a little girl with the boyish haircut. Today, I am an Assistant Professor at a university in Northern California’s Bay Area…but I’ll always be a daughter of Mexican immigrants who endured poverty and racism, whose parents’ wisdom are permanently etched in her heart through family stories and who weaves together her family’s educación, experiential knowledge and formal schooling for transformative power with Latina/o communities.

Author

• Rosa M. Jimenez, University of San Francisco