Abstract
This article details one teacher preparation course centering Latin American Testimonio narratives of struggle/survival amid structural oppression for use in secondary curriculum. As our class of predominantly Latina/o students and two Latina instructors engaged Testimonio pedagogy, we fashioned a hopeful alternative to our own experiences of intergenerational oppression. While research indicates that the experiences and histories of pre-service Teachers of Color lend pedagogical strength and critical consciousness to teacher education, three Latina pre-service students highlight the ways in which Testimonio became more than a pedagogical approach. Testimonio’s collectivity, resistance, hope, and assertions of voice and dignity moved through them not as educators first but as (great-grand)daughters of oppressed though still-resilient People(s). Testimonio emboldened these Latina pre-service educators to recognize and validate their own inherited multiliteracies, (re)claim their connectedness to land, and articulate their visions for more equitable schooling. This work advances research into the essentiality of engaging race and ethnicity in K-12 and teacher education curriculum and pedagogy.
Notes
1. While we name ourselves distinctly within our racial/ethnic, geographic, and linguistic identities, we identify here collectively as Latina.
2. We utilize Mexican/Mexican-American and Hispanic but gravitate toward the geographically bound, Mexicana/o, Hispana/o and playfully hybrid MeXicanas/os (Mexicana/o + Chicana/o/Xicana/o) to identify a shared heritage of Land-Based People(s) whose blended Indigenous, African, Spanish ancestry resulting from sixteenth century Spanish conquest of Mexico and present-day Southwest transcends man-made borders (Anzaldúa Citation1987; Villenas Citation2006).
3. Anticolonial and decolonial Chicana Feminism recognize Indigeneity as situated chiefly in ancestral lands (Pendleton Jiménez Citation2006; Calderon Citation2014) While at times we refer to Spanish as our home language and mother tongue, we recognize it has been forced upon indigenous heritage People(s) of the Americas within colonization and conquest. Notwithstanding, we embrace a complex identity tapestry situating Spanish not as ‘indigenous’ but ours, precious because it is the language of our generations, forcefully stripped from us in US schooling (Gonzales-Berry Citation2000).
4. While Rosa, Simona, and Rayanna wrote the formal Testimonios included and analyzed here, Mia and Annmarie as course instructors shared their Testimonios more informally, through face-to-face interactions with our research group, in class, and in other written correspondence with this research team.
5.
Testimonio are presented holistically with text connections either footnoted or fully integrated to maintain each author’s distinct form.
7. Sacred K’iche’ (Mayan) text cited in Menchú 1983, 102.
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