Before I began my formal research on testimonio last week, I
had a basic knowledge of what this genre is from exposure in past English
classes. However, it was interesting to
get a more in depth understanding of testimonio as well as to learn a thing or
two about the history of the genre.
For those unfamiliar with testimonio, it is a form of
autobiography that is typically written by marginalized groups of people, and
more specifically, by Latinx women. Two
of its defining features are its focus on telling a collective experience as
opposed to an individualized one and its use of multiple languages.
This second feature turned out to be a problem for me while
I was doing my research. A significant
number of the articles that I found were written either entirely or mostly in
Spanish. The first thing I did to combat
this issue was to specify in my search options that I was looking for works
written in English. This did completely
fix my problem though because bilingual research would still appear even if it
contained only a small amount of English.
Ultimately, I had to just look through the results to find research that
worked for me. Once I found one, it helped
to look at other works that were referenced and cited within the article. These tended to be relevant and useful as
well.
Another interesting issue that I ran into had to do with the
fact that testimonio is not as recognized or well-known as a lot of other
genres. I noticed there were a decent
amount of primary sources, but when it came to finding secondary sources, many
of them involved arguments for testimonio being useful and valid to teach in
classrooms, which wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
I have to be honest I have never heard of a testimonio before. Is it an older genre that has faded into obscurity or is it a newer development of genre? If that latter is true, is the collectivist approach an attempt at reconsidering Latin American literature?
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to know if testimonios came into popularity during a certain historical period or with political/social influences. The use of multiple languages and the "collective experience" suggests, to me, that these autobiographies are meant to unite minorities in the face of adversity or oppression. While I haven't heard too much about this genre before, it will be interesting in the coming future to see if more testimonios are published given the current political climate.
ReplyDeleteHey guys,
ReplyDeleteFrom my understanding, testimonio is a relatively new genre. My research suggests that it began to develop after the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s. However, it didn't become as popular as it is today until around the 1990s. At this point, university scholars began recognizing its worth and value. I would say that testimonio is a collectivist approach at reclaiming a particular culture, as opposed to reconsidering literature. However, testimonio writing often resembles other forms of storytelling, specifically oral histories, that are very familiar for many Latinx cultures.