Testimonio at work: the power of Malintzin researchers

ABSTRACT

We are three Latin American women, once travellers – now US dwellers, mujeres de color, Mestizas, Neplanteras – sometimes ‘Malintzin researchers’ struggling to make sense of all our pieces, identities and changing faces. We draw upon the disruption of apartheid of knowledge in academia, arguing for counter-narratives through the use of pláticas and testimonio as tools to theorize personal experiences that contribute to the decolonization of educational research. We are advancing pláticas and testimonios as epistemological and methodological approaches to challenge and disrupt widespread Westernized research approaches that continue colonizing the U.S. education research.

KEYWORDS:

• Testimonio
• pláticas
• decoloniality
• immigration
• women of colour in academia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Malintzin, Malinche and Doña Marina, are some of the names by which this historical figure is known. For more information about her and her role in the Spanish invasion in Mexican territory, see Elenes (2011) and Flores Carmona (2014).

2 We used the term apartheid as presented in Delgado Bernal and Villalpando (2002) to ‘convey the racial divisions between a dominant Eurocentric epistemology and epistemologies that stand in contrast to it, and to illustrate the climate of separation between what is considered “legitimate” knowledge and “illegitimate” knowledge in [the U.S.A.] academia’ (178).