Acceso usuarios
Magalí Rabasa
This article examines the uses of testimonio to represent experiences of crossing the US-Mexico border in the twenty-first century. I explore how new approaches to the use of both print and digital media suggest a reimagining of the potential of testimonio, through which many of the conventions of the genre have been disrupted, nearly fifty years after its codification by the Casa de las Américas annual award. In particular, I argue that conventional dynamics of solidarity connecting traditional intellectuals and readers in the North to their subaltern interlocutors have been replaced by practices of lateral solidarity. I explore how testimonios about border-crossing deploy experimental pedagogies that have the effect of undisciplining the genre of testimonio. I develop my arguments through a review of various collections of border-crossing testimonios, before turning my attention to an in-depth analysis of the content, form, and process of a book published in Oaxaca in 2010, Sentada frente a la muerte en el silencio del desierto, by Alma Murrieta. In doing so, I propose that the experiences of border-crossing in the twenty-first century demand new approaches to writing, reading, and listening, that destabilize epistemological and geopolitical boundaries of knowledge production.
