Undocumented Youths’ Testimonios as a Form of Narrative Dissent

• In Event: Un/Learning: Latinx Praxes

Abstract

Human beings are natural storytellers. In forms that range from traditional folk tales to online blogs, stories are told or performed in every known human culture. It therefore does not come as a surprise that when the undocumented youth decided to ‘come out of the shadows’ – to make their previously unheard voice heard in public – at the beginning of the 21st century, they also chose to present their lives in form of stories that recounted their life experiences as ‘illegal aliens’ autobiographically.
Unlike the broader undocumented population that is often described as existing “in the shadows” (cf. Chávez 1997), since the introduction of the DREAM Act in 2001 undocumented youths have indeed become increasingly vocal about their demands for social and legal inclusion. Looking more closely at the different forms of non-fiction created in the process, the generic categorization of undocumented stories as prototypical life writing, or even autobiographies, has to be rejected. There are possibly as many forms of undocumented life narratives as there are authors committing their stories to paper, (or not), and publication: While all produced texts share a self-referentiality, many of the stories are not presented in writing, but instead opt for new modes of online representation. This paper therefore aims to present how the Latin American genre of the testimonio was utilized by undocumented authors, focusing especially on how the genre was adapted and transferred to this new context of challenging a traditional binary, exclusionist fiction of the nation-state.

Author

• Ina Batzke, University of Muenster, Germany