Testimoniosof Life and Learning in the Borderlands: Subaltern Juárez Girls Speak

Abstract

This article presents the testimonios of two high school girls coming of age in one of the most marginalized areas of Ciudad Juárez, México who attend a school with a critical pedagogy orientation (Freire, 1970). Ciudad Juárez is a city on the U.S-México border and considered one of the most violent in the world today. These testimonios shed light on the life experiences and identity formation of young women coming of age in the south side of the border and reveal the knowledge and wisdom they have gained in their struggle for freedom, dignity, and life. They also expose the epistemological and pedagogical nature of young women's discourse and wisdom characterized by testimonios as counter-narratives, confessions, and consejos; and the role of a critical school in promoting such discourse. This article offers insight into the potential of schools to become sites of organic healing, critical consciousness, and agency in dystopic times by cultivating the use of testimonios as a way to center and legitimize subaltern knowledge.The eyes of the world have been on Ciudad Juárez, México for the last few decades. Images and stories of crime, feminicides 1 , violence, impunity, gendered cheap labor, drug trafficking, industrialization, and social inequalities abound in the literature and popular culture depicting this city along the U.S.-México border. Despite the numerous analyses that exist about Juárez, the voices of youth are typically absent. This article presents the testimonios of two high school girls coming of age in one of the most marginalized areas of Juárez. These testimonios offer salient depictions of experiences, identity formation, and epistemologies on the south side of the border where women's freedom is constantly contested and poor youth are continuously criminalized. Yet, their testimonios offer a language of hope and insight into the potential of schools to promote healing, critical consciousness, and agency in dystopic times. Through their testimonios, these young Juárez women use counter-narratives to interrupt the media-driven discourse, raise consciousness, and reclaim their humanity. Moreover, their testimonios have become part of a habitual discourse of confessions and consejos 2 , which they use as a pedagogical instrument for survival, healing, and collective learning. This article utilizes testimonio as a way to bring to the surface a narrative of urgency in the dystopic condition of Juárez and a potential tool to decolonize pedagogical and research practices. These ideas are grounded on Moraga and Anzaldúa's (1981) notion of "theory in the flesh" (p. 23), an organic theory that emerges in urgency and that privileges the real experiences, voices, and knowledge of subaltern women of color demanding attention and action. This is a "struggle of the flesh, and struggle of borders, an inner war" (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 100) in which women's brown bodies are the mediums, witnesses, and agents (Cruz, 2001). Brown bodies thus constitute the very sites of collision between the First and Third Worlds an...

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“…As such, Preparatoria Esperanza was indeed a very important aspect of all of the girls' lives; it represented a space of freedom, peace, and agency like no other, where they could actively engage in the self-authorship of their identities (Cervantes-Soon 2012). Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 04:24 12 June 2016…”

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