LibGuides: SPAN 3990: Spanish and Latin American Cultures Senior Seminar (Spring 24)): Testimonio and Oral History

Testimonio and Oral History

In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé offers a working definition/ understanding of testimonio:

"Variously classified as a genre or subgenre of Latin American and Latina/o nonfictional writing, an activist pedagogical technique for the constitution of a subject that has undergone trauma or been marginalized and silenced by being placed in a “border” condition between official or hegemonic discourses, in the category, that is, of those who, as one of its practitioners ironically states (Barnet 1994, 203), have ostensibly “no history,” as well as a method for the transformation of that condition into consciousness, collective memory, theory, and political action, testimonio is the resulting textual or visual product of an individual act of witnessing and/or experiencing an abject social state that is more than individual, that is indeed collective. "

Testimonio and oral history, as overlapping and connected categories, find their documentation in a range of forms, including published books, unpublished archival materials, film, and sound recording. Resources below offer pathways to finding testimonios and oral histories related to Latin American and Spanish history.

To search for testimonios or oral histories published in book form, you may start with a CLIO catalog search using testimonio as a keyword, along with other terms that point to specific geographical and otherwise historical contexts. For instance: testimonio AND "El Salvador"

Puerto Rican Oral History Project records 1973-1975 (Center for Brooklyn History)
This collection includes recordings and transcripts of oral histories narrated by those in the Puerto Rican community of Brooklyn in the twentieth century. The Long Island Historical Society initiated the Puerto Rican Oral History Project in 1973. Over eighty interviews were conducted documenting the experiences of Brooklyn residents who arrived from Puerto Rico between 1917 and 1940.
Spanish Civil War Memory Project: Audiovisual Archive of the Francoist Repression
The digital Archive of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Dictatorship is an initiative of UCSD in collaboration with several Spanish civic associations, such as the ARMH (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), the Asociación de Ex-presos y Represaliados Políticos, the Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria and others. With the assistance of these human rights organizations, since the summer of 2007 several teams of graduate students at UC San Diego have been recording audiovisual testimonies of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression.
Unfinished Sentences
A project of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, Unfinished Sentences brings testimonio as well as declassified government documents related to the Salvadoran Civil War.
Voces Oral History Project
A project of the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas in Austin, Voces " dedicated to recording, preserving and disseminating the stories of US Latinas and Latinos and weaving the many perspectives into our historical narrative at the national, state and local levels."