Testimoniando Para Resistir: Engaging in Testimonio Research to Create Space for Latina Faculty in the Academy

• In Event: A Critical Exploration of Womxn of Color Feminisms, Theories, and Methodologies in Higher Education

Abstract

Women of color have held a long-standing tradition of using their writing as a tool of resistance against the various forms of oppression that they face in their everyday life because of their existence (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015). Through her writings, Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana scholar and writer, spoke out against the impact of patriarchy on women (Cultural Tyranny), life on the borderlands, and the importance of language as part of her identity as a border-crossing Chicana (Anzaldúa, 1987). For Anzaldúa there was no separation between her life and her writings. This connection to writing and the commitment to dispel the myths of women of color through writing is a tradition that she hoped other women of color would adopt. In a letter she wrote to Third World women writers, she urged, “We cannot allow ourselves to be tokenized. We must make our own writing and that of Third World women the first priority” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 166). Women of color in and out of the academy have taken up this call to center their own voice and words to tell their stories – their testimonios.
While the number of Latina faculty has slowly increased as institutions of higher education have worked to diversify their faculty, this increase has come at a sluggish pace. In the fall of 1991, Latinas accounted for a mere 0.8% (4,069) of all full-time faculty within the United States (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 1995). The numbers are even more dire when comparing the rates of faculty who are tenured or on the tenure-track; Latina faculty only accounted for 0.6% of that group in 1991 (NCES, 1995). Nearly twenty-five years later in the fall of 2015, Latina faculty numbers had only increased to 2.2% of all faculty, and 1.8% of tenured or tenure-track faculty (NCES, 2016). In contrast, White women, Black women, and Asian women account for 31%, 2.8%, and 3.9% of the total full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty (NCES, 2016). This lack of representation of Latinas within the professoriate, specifically as tenured and tenure-track faculty, point to deep-seated systemic and institutional factors that have prevented a significant increase in the representation of Latina faculty.
This study is an autoethnographic study in which I reflect on my personal experiences conducting my dissertation study for which I collected the testimonios of tenure-track Latina faculty. Education scholars have begun to use testimonio as a methodology in order to move away from the “eurocentricity of traditional educational research” (Perez Huber, 2009, p. 644). While conducting this study, I have had to continuously reflect and reconcile the fact that I am striving to conduct anti-racist work with the expended research process that has historically othered communities of color. Beyond sharing my own testimonios of the challenges I have encountered while conducting this study, I will also provide lessons and recommendations for other scholars looking to create anti-racist scholarship with the use of testiomonio as a methodology.

Author

• Berenice Sánchez, Idaho State University