“Mi Historia Familiar Es Sencilla” (My Family History Is Simple)”: Testimonio in the New Latino Diaspora

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we share the testimonio of Santana, an immigrant from rural México, who explained the ways that she navigates her life and raises her children as a Latina immigrant woman here in the southeastern United States. Our inquiry is guided by analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with Santana over a period of three years. We argue that Santana saw these interviews as an opportunity to share testimonios—embodied life stories that bear witness to a history of social injustice. Testimonio centralizes marginalized knowledge and documents a collective experience of injustice via an individual narrative. Santana’s testimonio underscores the complex ways that Latina migrants draw from embodied experiences to resist oppression and sobrevivir, a verb that implies not only enduring, but moving forward with knowledge, power, self-confidence, and creativity. We argue that her testimonio disrupts the power relations embedded in the traditional hierarchy between the researcher and the research participant.

TRANSLATIONS BY:

• María Elena Rodríguez Ramírez

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our deep gratitude to Santana for welcoming us into her home and sharing her testimonio with us. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful attention to our work.

Notes

¹ Transcription conventions adapted from (Eggins & Slade, 1997, pp. 2–5).

(XX) Non-transcribable segments of talk.

(vida) Uncertain transcription where speech was not 100% clear.

. . . Deleted speech

E:ven ;Elongated sound

Bolded Emphasized speech.

² For more information about other facets of this study, please see (Fitts & McClure, 2015a; 2015b).