Testimonios of Life and Learning in the Borderlands: Subaltern Juárez Girls Speak

Abstract

This article presents the testimonios of two high school girls coming of age in one of the most marginalized areas of Ciudad Juárez, México who attend a school with a critical pedagogy orientation (Freire, 1970). Ciudad Juárez is a city on the U.S-México border and considered one of the most violent in the world today. These testimonios shed light on the life experiences and identity formation of young women coming of age in the south side of the border and reveal the knowledge and wisdom they have gained in their struggle for freedom, dignity, and life. They also expose the epistemological and pedagogical nature of young women's discourse and wisdom characterized by testimonios as counter-narratives, confessions, and consejos; and the role of a critical school in promoting such discourse. This article offers insight into the potential of schools to become sites of organic healing, critical consciousness, and agency in dystopic times by cultivating the use of testimonios as a way to center and legitimize subaltern knowledge.

Notes

1. I utilize the term “feminicide” over “femicide,” following Fregoso and Bejarano's (2010) conceptualization of the term which interrupts essentialist constructs of female identity by underscoring how gender norms, inequalities and power relationships, rather than the biological notion of the female sex, increase women's vulnerability to violence.

2. Consejos are spontaneous homilies utilized to give advice or to instill behaviors and attitudes and relate closely to the concept of educacio´n (Valde´s, 1996; Valencia & Black, 2002).

3. While the translation of the word autogestión is usually found in dictionaries as self-management, this English term does not fully encompass the meaning of this word at Preparatoria Esperanza. Elsewhere, I (Cervantes-Soon, 2011) have provided a nuanced analysis of the way this term was used and what it represented to both students and teachers at Esperanza. Suffice it to say that, to them, autogestión involved not only self-management skills, but also, and more importantly, the ability to “read the world” (Freire, 1970) and the power dimensions of their context in order to be critical self-makers and agents of change. For this reason, I chose to maintain the Spanish term and the definition above.

4. Subcomandante Marcos is a public intellectual and the spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a Mexican guerrilla movement demanding rights for indigenous peoples.

5. “Señora” and “señorita” are formal ways to refer to women, Mrs. and Miss respectively.

6. A person from the Mexican state of Veracruz, a state from which many of the soldiers in Juárez are recruited.