Testimonio

Translating as testimony or testimonial narrative, the Spanish term testimonio implies bearing witness or testifying as if in a court or church. As a genre of literature, testimonio has been associated with autobiographical accounts of Latin American survivors of oppression. A narrator, the testimonialista, often illiterate and from a background of poverty, has experienced the combined forces of state and corporate, colonialist, and imperialist forms of economic, political, and cultural oppression. The testimonial is told to an interlocutor, someone who is likely to care, listen, sympathize with the individual, and try to comprehend the unjust social conditions that generate the plight. Because the narrator typically is unable or unwilling to write, the interlocutor records, transcribes, and edits the account, producing texts suitable for publication. In this fashion, testimonios bring the history of the oppressed and of social justice issues to light, hopefully to sensitize readers and drum up political will to bring about needed change.

Testimonial practices are traditional forms in Latin American literature. European soldiers and priests in colonial times related their experiences in chronicles. Writers about the Conquest sought to convey events from the natives' perspectives. During the nationalist period of the 19th century, authors used letters and autobiographical essays to describe struggles for emancipation; at least one slave narrative fueled the abolition movement. In the 20th century, the continuing histories of Latin American people's resistance to interlocking systems of colonial, class, race and gender oppression, and the development of anthropology as a discipline, led to the publication of noted testimonios. This literature puts into words, among others, the genocidal predicaments of the Mayans in Guatemala, as told by 1992 Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum to Elizabeth Burgos-Debray in 1984; the struggles of Bolivian miners that Domitila Barrios described to Moema Viezzer in 1977; and the composite voices in the testimonies of student protestors and other participants in the 1968 night of repression in Mexico City, in Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico in 1974.

Critics discuss testimonio in ways that describe its characteristics, raise important theoretical questions, and point to problems. John Beverly explains the voice of narrators as of a real, rather than fictional, person and the mark of a desire not to be silenced or defeated, to impose oneself on an institution of power and privilege from the position of the excluded, the marginal, and the subaltern. This is the voice of an organic intellectual, a thinker who emerges from the situation of despair, creates new meanings, and finds the courage (and a listener) to break with conformity to speak his or her mind, often at great risk. The voice has a metonymic and polyphonic character, for it speaks for the muted voices of those who faced the same ordeals. There is a sense of urgency in the testimonial voice, for the problems are serious and demand intervention.

Narrators are subalterns, due to the positions of subordination and experiences of oppression about which they testify. Whether they come from a different culture or from the same country as the narrator, inter-locutors have led, by definition, more privileged lives. Often academics or journalists, interlocutors are educated and have the power to access the written word and print media. Consequently, despite the supposedly democratic nature of the testimonial process, and even though the narrator has achieved status as an organic intellectual, she or he remains in a subaltern stance visà-vis the interlocutor—their relationship is thus challenging. There is danger in that narrators may confront the same colonial, elitist, racist, and sexist issues from the past in their exchanges with interlocutors.

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