Testimonio refers to the firsthand narrative from a marginalized group who has experienced or is experiencing oppression or unjust circumstances. A testimonio is told by  the subaltern (groups who were unrecognized, excluded or misrepresented by their colonial oppressors) in order to propagate a struggle against oppression and injustice. These accounts are often a means of seeking international solidarity, such as in Rigoberta Menchú’s Nobel-Prize-winning testimonio against genocide in Guatemala. Testimonio is the narrative of witnesses (who are victims/survivors themselves) of oppression, as opposed to official narratives which are often presented in context of outside (occupying) interests (Yúdice 15). In this sense, the witnesses use their testimonio as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity (Yúdice 17). Testimonio helps compensate for the voice which marginalized groups have been denied.

Reyes and Rodríguez define testimonio as a “legacy of reflexive narratives of liberation used by people throughout the world” (525) whose objective is to “bring to light a wrong, a point of view, or an urgent call for attention” (525). They suggest that this form of writing “entails a first person oral or written account, drawing on experiential, self-conscious, narrative practice to articulate an urgent voicing of something to which one bears witness” (525). They also suggest that the testimonio “has the unique characteristic of being a political and conscientized reflection that is often spoken”; it can be presented as a memoir, an oral history, prose, song lyrics, quantitative vignettes, or spoken word (525).

Beverley claims that the word testimonio, in Spanish, “carries the connotation of an act of truth telling in a religious or legal sense – dar testimonio means to testify, to bear truthful witness. Testimonio’s ethical and epistemological authority derives from the fact that we are meant to presume that its narrator is someone who has lived in his or her person, or indirectly through the experiences of friends, family, neighbours or significant others, the events and experiences that he or she narrates”(3).

Many aspects of this definition by John Beverley have been challenged by important voices among Latin American scholars (Beasley-Murray 122). In particular, the demand to “bear truthful witness” opens survivors of trauma up to scrutiny for minute details of their accounts. If you are interested in learning more about testimonios and their political impact by looking at a couple of examples, check out: Rigoberta Menchu and Elena Poniatowska.

References:

Reyes, Kathryn Blackmer, and Julia E. Curry Rodríguez. “Testimonio: Origins, terms, and resources.” Equity & Excellence in Education 45.3 (2012): 525-538.

Beverley, John. Testimonio: On the politics of truth. U of Minnesota P, 2004.

Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 15-31.

Beasley‐Murray, Jon. “Thinking solidarity: Latinamericanist intellectuals and testimonio.”Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 7.1 (1998): 121-129.

Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Ed. 3. Siglo XXI, 1985.

Poniatowska, Elena. La noche de Tlatelolco: testimonios de historia oral. Ediciones Era, 1998.

Entry by: Cynthia, Fernanda, Natalia, Ili with minor revisions by Tamara ????