Blog


Special issue: “Chicana/Latina Testimonios: Mapping the Methodological, Pedagogical, and Political

by

Equity & Excellence in Education 45:3, 363-72 (2012)
Dolores Delgado Bernal, Rebeca Burciaga & Judith Flores Carmona,

While the genre of testimonio has deep roots in oral cultures and in Latin American human rights struggles, the publication and subsequent adoption of This Bridge called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983) and more recently Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latina Feminist group, 2001) by Chicanas and Latinas, have demonstrated the power of testimonio as a genre that exposes brutality, disrupts silencing, and builds solidarity among women of color (Anzaldua, 1990). Within the field of education, scholars are increasingly taking up testimonio as a pedagogical, methodological, and activist approach to social justice that transgresses traditional paradigms in academia. Unlike the more common training of researchers to produce unbiased knowledge, testimonio challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance. These approaches have resulted in new understandings about how marginalized communities build solidarity and respond to and resist dominant culture, laws, and policies that perpetuate inequity. This special issue contributes to our understanding of testimonio as it relates to methdology, pedagogy, research, and reflection within a social justice education framework. A common thread among these articles is a sense of political urgency to address educational inequities within Chicana/o and Latina/o communities.

–from the introductory essay by Dolores Delgado Bernal, Rebeca Burciaga & Judith Flores Carmona

Read More

Chicana por mi Raza fundraiser: Get VP to EP!

by

We posted here earlier about the Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR) Archival Online Database project co-directed by Maria Cotera of University of Michigan, and Linda Garcia Merchant of Voces Primeras.  The project seeks to provide “broad-based public access to oral histories, … Read More

Rest in peace, Chavela Vargas (Apr 17, 1919 – Aug 5, 2012)

by

La voz áspera de la ternura, Chavela Vargas (via Lina Murillo)

From the Associated Press:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Chavela Vargas, who defied gender stereotypes to become one of the most legendary singers in Mexico, died Sunday at age 93.  Her friend and biographer Maria Cortina said Vargas died at a hospital in the city of Cuernavaca, where she had been admitted for heart and respiratory problems.

Vargas rose to fame flouting the Roman Catholic country’s preconceptions of what it meant to be a female singer: singing lusty “ranchera” songs while wearing men’s clothes, carrying a pistol, drinking heavily and smoking cigars.

Though she refused to change the pronouns in love songs about women as some audiences expected, many of her versions of passionate Mexican folk songs are considered definitive.

Born in San Joaquin de Flores, Costa Rica, on April 17, 1919, Vargas immigrated to Mexico at age 14. She sang in the streets as a teenager, then ventured into a professional singing career well in her 30s.  “I was never afraid of anything because I never hurt anyone,” Vargas told the audience at a Mexico City tribute concert in June 2011. “I was always an old drunk.”

Read More