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MEMOIR,
AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
TESTIMONIO
Norma E. Cantú

Introduction

As a life-long reader of biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, testimonios, and

what Gloria Anzaldúa called autohistorias, I expect certain features or characteristics
of books that pretend to render a person’s life on the page. Certainly, I expect to
situate the story in a time and space/place so that I have a sense of how the person’s
life was shaped by the environment. As a creative writer of what I call auto-
bioethnography, I am also interested in the cultural or ethnographic aspects of that
life; furthermore, as a Chicana/Latina feminist scholar, I am also very much inter-
ested in life-writing that explores the intersections of oppressions in Latino/a com-
munities. And finally, I expect such writings to offer a glimpse into someone’s life
that will illuminate my own. Perhaps that is too much to ask as a reader, but I must
say that I am not often disappointed and that most Latina/Chicana life stories meet
my expectations. In writing this chapter, then, I present an exploration of the genre
that I am calling life-writing. Because of my personal penchant for epistemologies
born of experience, I examine the three main subgenres – autobiography, memoir,
and testimonio – focusing on the contributions each makes to the overall develop-
ment of Latina/Chicana literature. The autobioethnographic project, thus, emerges
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from theorizing and assessing knowledge formation from the author’s exploration of
a self-folklore, that is a self-knowledge akin to what Anzaldúa called “autohistoria-
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teoría”. As such, then, the life-writing genre, collectively framed as it is, adds to the
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body of knowledge gained from the folk, from the communities we inhabit as
Latinas/Chicanas. In reading autobiographies, memoirs, and testimonios, I delve
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beyond the story of the life to that of the knowledge produced by living that life in a
community, and specifically in the latinidades that we Latina/Chicana writers inhabit.
I want to draw an important distinction within the life-writing genre and that is the
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person who is telling the story – if that person is an author who is in some way,
setting the record straight, or offering his or her construction of a life as an author, it
will invariably result in a much different narrative than if it is a non-academic, or a

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person not in the business of writing, as it were; this I have perceived in reading the
autobiographies, memoirs, and testimonios of Latinos/as and Chicanos/as who come
from the world of business or of medicine, for example, and those written by professional
writers. In this brief essay, I limit my discussion to exploring works of autobiography,
memoir, and testimonio as genres that constitute an important subsection of Latino/
a literature; focusing on these forms allows me to explore the particular sociopolitical
conditions of the writers and the transnationality of the genres while also addressing
issues of definition and classification and the larger literary and sociocultural aspects
of life-writing. I argue that Latino/a and Chicano/a life-writing differs from that of more
mainstream authors. Even as it adheres to the conventions of the genres, in general, I
note that the dislocation of fixed boundaries and the nudging of the conventions
adds to the development and enrichment of the genres of life-writing. But, before I
begin my discussion of the genres and the themes and kinds of life-writing they
constitute, I offer a brief discussion of the cataloging and defining of the genres, which
includes a perfunctory discussion of the origins of such writing in the Americas.

Definitions and categories

The genres of life-writing – autobiography, memoir, and testimonio – can overlap and
one could flippantly say that the definition and categorization of such writing is elusive.
How such life stories are categorized intrigues me, and I find classifying and defining
these genres can become problematic because of the polemic around where to situate the
various voices vis-à-vis the traditional genres. Often, in the desire to establish definitions
or boundaries for genres, scholars will focus on delimiting the life-writing genres and
thus become exclusionary. These different genres have had an impact on multiple levels,
to be sure, but for my purposes, it is the voices of subaltern subjects that remain
at the heart of any discussion on Latino/a or Chicano/a life-writing. I discuss the nuances
later in the essay; for now, I offer the more common definitions and categories.
Using the categorization and taxonomic models used by Woods (1994; 2005) and
others, it is easy to place certain texts within the genre classifications such as “auto-
biography” or “biography.” It is harder, given the slippery categorization that has existed
in the past, to decide to label a text a “memoir” or a “testimonio.” Thus, I propose
that all these genres fall within the umbrella term of life-writing, not unlike the way
that Rina Benmayor (2011) defines the overarching genre as life-story; I have in the past
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used the term “life-story” interchangeably with “life-writing” as used by Richard

D. Woods (1994: 750). But here, I am proposing that the latter is perhaps a better
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choice. Life-writing, broadly speaking, includes anything from a roman-à-clef to a

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testimonio or to the traditional forms of life-writing, such as autobiography. I do want

to emphasize that within this schema we can also place what Gloria Anzaldúa called
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“autohistoria” or “autohistoria-teoría,” concepts that AnaLouise Keating explains

amply in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009). In my view such varied expressions of life-
writing can easily be categorized as life-writing for in one way or another a person’s
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life unfolds within the narrative. Woods uses “autobiography” and “life-writing”
interchangeably, using the term “autobiography” as the overarching umbrella term; I do
the reverse because I find life-writing to be a more useful and all-encompassing term.

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Woods classifies the entries in his article and in his books, projects that are
essentially bibliographies of autobiographical writings in Mexico, into what he calls
“The various forms of autobiography” that he then categorizes under “subgenres:
memoirs, autobiography proper, journal, diary, letters, interview, and testimony or a
hybrid form” (Woods 1994: 755). I find his attempt useful and agree that in Latino/a
and Chicano/a literary studies we can easily include all of these “subgenres,” under
the category of “autobiography,” but my use of the term “life-writing” allows for an
expansion that includes blended genre works, transgeneric works, and testimonio.
Because it also allows for a discussion of what it means for a people who have trad-
itionally not had the resources or access to inserting their life story into the national
fabric, or into the hegemonic literary canon, life-writing explodes the boundaries of
the more traditional genres.
In an effort to clarify and understand the nuances and complexities of the genre of
life-writing, I offer definitions gleaned first from scholars who have attempted to
define and classify the genres, and then drawing from my own readings and experi-
ences I map out a territory that has often appeared messy and murky. A “memoir”
according to scholars, such as Woods, is self-authored and tells about one or more
incidents in the life of a subject; it does not render a full narrative from birth to
some point in time but focuses instead on significant life-changing events.
“Autobiography,” on the other hand, generally begins at birth and traces the per-
son’s life trajectory across time; it is often written in chronological order along a
calendrical schema. The reader, thus, journeys along through the author’s memories
of a life. Even within these two fairly common genres we may find others that defy
classification, such as those that braid the life story with a larger historical or
political narrative often reflecting a communal story. In the last 20 years or so,
testimonio has emerged as a genre, or subgenre, that exists within its own terrain of
life-writing, alongside autobiography and memoir.
In defining these terms I look at the purpose and role such writing plays in Latino/a
and Chicano/a literature. In addition to looking at life story writing as a chronicle
of what happens in one’s life or what is happening in the world at large, the very act
of writing itself has been referred to as being a cathartic experience, one that heals
wrongs and may impel social action (Beverley 1993; 2004). Variants of life-writing
may surface in response to a need. For example, I coined the term “fictional auto-
bioethnography,” a blend of autobiography and ethnographic research, to describe
the mix of life story and ethnographic research in a literary genre. This is where it
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becomes messy, as various authors may come to a genre for various reasons and
may even designate a subgenre within a larger one, as does Gloria Anzaldúa who
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eschews the use of testimonio in favor of “autohistoria” or “autohistoria-teoría” for

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her blended transgeneric work that is firmly grounded in a self-authored first-

person – at times third-person – narrative that weaves aspects of her memories and
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experiences with poetry and what could be called a philosophical essay form.
I use my own example to talk about the decision to create or at least expand a
particular genre. I suppose my blending of genres could be traced back to my read-
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ing of key texts, mostly biographies and autobiographies by such writers as French
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Tristes Tropiques I read when I was in
graduate school in the 1970s. It and other texts probably influenced the way that

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I subsequently wrote my own academic cultural studies and even my literary creative
work. Much later, I found Lévi-Strauss problematic and disturbing after considering
his othering of those whom he studies; albeit this insight didn’t come until much
later when I revisited the text armed with a more sophisticated, read mature, lens.
Later, books such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Cherríe
Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983), and Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta No Verte
Jesús Mío (1969; 31st edn, 2007), with their distinctive blends of genres, including
autobiography, poetry, and journalistic, scholarly, and theoretical writings, affirmed
my own inclination to engage in what I perceived was a new way of telling stories,
especially mine. Much later, another anthropologist offered still another way of
weaving the personal and the scholarly; Ruth Behar’s books, Translated Woman:
Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology
that Breaks Your Heart, presented models of a different way of writing scholarly studies
braided with personal narrative.
In an earlier publication, I write of early influences, of my early fascination with
life-writing, and of my predilection for reading diaries and autobiographies, from the
diaries of Anaïs Nin and The Diary of Anne Frank to Nabokov’s Speak Memory
(Cantú 2001: 130–1); one of the most memorable of these was Carolina Maria de
Jesús’s Child of the Dark (1962), with its bold and fierce protagonist, the feisty and
brilliant poor black Brazilian woman who writes her book on scraps of paper. In
fact, my autobioethnographic project stems from these and many other early influ-
ences. Fortunate to have found that the very act of telling stories, especially of
my own life, becomes a vehicle for investigating and gaining insight, I was led to tell
my own life story, a life lived along the US-Mexico border told through the life
story variant. That is how Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (Cantú
1995) came to be; although not entirely bildungsroman, not autobiography and not
memoir or testimonio, it is all these and nevertheless tells a coming-of-age story set
in the 1950s and 1960s on the US-Mexico borderlands. In my conclusion to the present
essay, I will return to texts such as this one and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands (1987).
The purpose and the role of such writing within Chicano/a and Latino/a literature
will surface as I discuss the three genres upon which this essay revolves. I begin with
a discussion of autobiography, laying out a brief historical context, but I integrate
the discussions on memoir and testimonio and sift through the ideas of life-writing
to present a panoramic view offering only texts selected because they are repre-
sentative of the issue at hand; the list is by no means exhaustive. Because I believe
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these three important genres of Chicano/a and Latino/a literature – autobiography,

memoir, and testimonio – demand a deeper analysis, I conclude the essay with some
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suggestions for such, as I introduce some of the polemics associated with the study
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of life-writing in general such as the place of oral history and/or subaltern studies
within the genre.
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Autobiography
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In his study of early California autobiographies, Genaro Padilla finds that, during the
period immediately following 1848, several writers took it upon themselves to leave

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a chronicle of their lives. As one of these landed elite Californios, Mariano Guadalupe
Vallejo, wrote, “I am willing to relate all I can remember, but I wish it clearly
understood that it must be in my own way, and at my own time. I will not be hur-
ried or dictated to. It is my history and not yours I propose to tell” (quoted in
Padilla 1993: 3). Such chronicles, not unlike the Cantares Mexicanos from the
sixteenth century, are remembrances of life at a time of contact between two
cultures – in this case between Mexican and immigrant Anglo populations, while in
the Cantares the contact is between European and indigenous Americans. One aspect
of such chronicles is the “as told to” nature of the narratives. In his essay on
Mexican autobiography, Woods traces the practice of having an interlocutor to
the sixteenth century when “Fr. Bernardo de Sahagún (1500–1590) initiated the
anthropological document by interviewing Indians to inventory and record their
culture” (Woods 1994: 753). Velasco also traces the tradition of life-writing in the
Americas to the colonizing project (Velasco 2004: 313). He notes that Alvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación is a form of life-writing in so far as he narrates his
experiences living in what is now the US Southwest during the first part of the sixteenth
century (Velasco 2004: 321). Claiming that life-writing predates European influence,
Padilla alludes to the first-person autobiographical poetry of an earlier period as well
and deems them precursors to the life narratives that surface in what is now the
Southwest during the nineteenth century; he specifically cites the poems where the
repetition of the autobiographical “I” “is nothing less than the autobiographical need
to textually affix one’s name and experience upon history” (Padilla 1988: 288). Along
with the poetry, the histories collected by Sahagún tell what had happened during
one of the most drastic changes to occur in the history of the world, the coming of
the Europeans to the Americas, and serve as chronicles documenting the transfor-
mation that occurs as the two worlds come together. In these instances, as in those
I discuss below, the authors’ purpose is clear.
Similarly, autobiographies by the landed elites who witnessed the conquest of the
US Southwest in the mid-nineteenth century offer a view of two other worlds
coming together. As Velasco and Padilla note, the mid-nineteenth century is the site
of a surge of narratives chronicling the occupation of the Southwest after the defeat
of Mexico by the US. In addition, other narratives of how Latinos/as are treated in
the US exist from early on in the twentieth century; mostly the purpose of these fall
within one of two categories: immigrant narratives of survival or folklore-inspired
narratives that seek to resist the erasure of traditional culture during a radical
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reshaping of traditional culture.

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Immigrant stories
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Among the myriad of stories that tell of the move from a place of origin to the
United States, and worth mentioning because of its place in the recovery of Cuban-
American literature, is a work penned by a non-Mexican or Mexican-origin writer in
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the US. Evelio Grillo’s Black Cuban, Black American (2000) is a first-person narrative
focused on the diasporic Latino experience of an Afro-Cuban in the US in the early
twentieth century. These kinds of narratives constitute the bulk of contemporary life

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stories. Because they are perhaps the most prolific and because the immigrant tale is
one that needs to be told and read, I suspect the number of such narratives will
grow. While the early nineteenth-century autobiographies and memoirs tell of a
deterritorialized people who have not moved, but whose land and status have been
taken, the twentieth-century immigrant narrative – from various latinidades – tells of
a search for the American Dream, of movement in search of a better life. In the
twentieth century, the urge to write and tell one’s story is also driven by a different
motor: a subaltern subject speaking against oppression; this is so especially for
colonized subjects such as Puerto Ricans and Chicanos/as. Many instances of such
life stories of struggle and survival against oppression and the intersections of
oppressive conditions exist; many of them are grounded in the systemic targeting of
Chicanos who somehow manage to survive to tell the story. Books such as Luis J.
Rodríguez’s Always Running: Mi Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA (1994) and his most
recent, It Calls You Back (2011), Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to
Stand, and Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street come to mind. A major difference
between these and the earlier autobiographies of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century, that told of the displacement from territory or the loss of status, lies in
the motivation of the authors; these contemporary texts chronicle the oppressive
conditions for Latinos/as and Chicanos/as in the United States in the latter part of
the twentieth century as told by a subaltern voice. I discuss these and other such
texts below in my discussion of Chicano/a life-writing. Such life story narratives
alongside innumerable self-authored and often self-published books about life in the
streets that span the last 50 years bring the subgenre of autobiography to readers
who may then learn of particular subcultures within the various latinidades. If, as
Bergland claims in her article on ethnic autobiographies (she uses Gramsci’s com-
ment about autobiographies replacing the political or philosophical essay) the his-
torical value of autobiography lies in its intent to reflect life as it is and not as it
should be (Bergland 1994: 70), we can say that these autobiographies of survival
against intersecting oppressions are indeed an indictment of political and social
conditions. I turn again to Bergland’s claim to explore the idea that as the motivation
to write one’s life story may be different for Chicanos/as and Latinos/as in the
United States, who may not have had access to the usual avenues of publication;
writing one’s life story to document the vicissitudes of life as a Latino/a or Chicano/a
in the United States is equivalent to drafting eloquent political or philosophical
essays in earlier historical periods. During the Chicano/a Movement, publication of
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autobiographical poetry and essays flourished. The very act of writing such a narra-
tive fixes in time and space and in a particular way the conditions that exist in the
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lives of the author and attests to her or his struggle and affirms the survival of the
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author. While some authors use the term “memoir” in the title, such as Richard
Rodríguez or John Phillip Santos and Evelio Grillo, many insist on using the term
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“autobiography,” such as Oscar Z. Acosta did in his polemical Autobiography of

Brown Buffalo. Michael Hames-García’s article on Acosta’s satirical autobiographical
novels articulates why he considers them a logical fit into the genre of testimonio
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(Hames-García 2000).
Regardless of the life-writing genre that the author (or the publisher) chooses to
affix to the book cover, invariably, it is the power of the story and of the storytelling

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that draws the reader to the text. I now turn to one subgenre, the immigrant life-
writing whose purpose is to chronicle one’s life as an offering for future generations,
driven by the desire to serve as role model or as exemplar of what can be done in
the United States.
Mexican-origin Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa’s Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from
Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon (2011) published 20 years after Jorge Prieto’s
Harvest of Hope: The Pilgrimage of a Mexican-American Physician (1989), contrasts
sharply with Prieto’s tale of becoming a physician, although both tell immigrant
tales of arriving in the United States and of achieving the American Dream despite
tremendous personal sacrifice. Prieto, the son of an elected governor from the state
of San Luis Potosi, fled Mexico with his family during the violence of the Mexican
Revolution; despite his privileged status, he suffered poverty and incredible hard-
ships as he migrated back and forth to Mexico finally settling down in Chicago
where he served the poor Mexican and African-American population for more than
40 years.
As a once undocumented migrant from Mexico, Quiñones-Hinojosa, on the other
hand, tells of the vagaries of surviving the racism and prejudices of US mainstream
institutions and individual encounters, in this case even as a brain surgeon who must
contend with his patients’ racism; he eloquently notes that the brains of human
beings are the same regardless of color; he writes his autobiography with the assis-
tance of Mim Eichler Rivas, a friend he claims helped him “bring out childhood,
adolescent and adult memories” and with whom he shares authorial credit
(Quiñones-Hinojosa and Rivas 2011: 313–14).
Another migrant family story with a similar trajectory is South Texas native Elva
Treviño Hart’s Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child (1999) that invites the reader
to learn the truth of a family’s life in a migrant camp while celebrating the achieve-
ment of the author who triumphs against all odds, achieving a high-paying position
at IBM. Collected in Paths to Discovery: Autobiographies of Chicanas with Careers in
Mathematics, Science and Engineering (Cantú 2007) the stories of ten Chicanas outside
of the literary world also document the resilience and persistence necessary to
achieve success.
While these stories of survival against apparently insurmountable obstacles offer
inspiring narratives of true life, some writers, perhaps the more literary inclined,
tend to fictionalize the story and pepper their narratives with imagined plot twists
and turns while set against a backdrop of truth.
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Fictionalized autobiography
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As in Prieto and Quiñones-Hinojosa’s autobiographies, some Latino/a authors

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reflect the conditions of life within a political and social world where the
author, or the protagonist, survives against serious obstacles, but unlike Prieto and
Quiñones-Hinojosa, their narratives wear the cloak of fiction, what used to be called
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romans-à-clef. In addition to memoirs and autobiographies such as Judith Ortiz

Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) and
Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood (1993), there

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seemed to be a proliferation of fictionalized life story narratives published in the

1990s: Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) Dominican-
American Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991), Cuban-
American Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and Achy Obeja’s We
Came All the Way from Cuba so You Could Dress Like This? (1994). These authors
situated in a somewhat elite social status having the advantage of an education bring
to the terrain of life-writing a woman’s voice, if not always a strong feminist one, to
challenge the phallocentric and often male-centered life-writing. In Santiago, Obejas,
and Garcia’s cases, a privileged location within the writing culture as journalists
brings an even stronger positionality within the mainstream literary world. Santiago
dwells on the hardship endured as a child in Puerto Rico. Alvarez and García on the
other hand chronicle a more privileged life, at least until the families go to the
United States and encounter the harsh reality of racism and economic disparity for
Latinos/as in that country.

Chicano/a life-writing

In the Chicano literary canon, early autobiographies from Ernesto Galarza’s

Barrio Boy (1971) to Oscar Z. Acosta’s fictionalized autobiography, The Autobiography
of a Brown Buffalo (1972), also reflect the social and political oppressions of their
time. Yet, they become fodder for critical discussions of what is the role of auto-
biography and its place within the political and social testament of the Movimiento
and of the parameters of telling the story of a life. Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of
Memory: The Education of Richard Rodríguez (1982) presents a case in point, for
with the publication of his first memoir, his controversial stance on affirmative
action and on bilingual education elicited a strident response from Chicano/a
scholars. Beverley notes that Rodríguez both positions himself within subalternity,
while disidentifying as subaltern subject (1993: 30). He followed Hunger of
Memory with two other memoirs and other creative non-fiction narratives. Days of
Obligation (1992) and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003), the memoirs, have
somewhat redeemed him for in these subsequent autobiographical writings
Rodríguez revisits some of what was most abhorrent to Chicano working-class critics
who saw in his work a devaluing of the cultural production and location of anything
but the hegemonic, read white, middle-class world. His more candid treatment of
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his homosexuality and of his life formations have allowed critics to consider that his
early work came from a place that had no use for the “Mexican” in his life; the
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newer work searches for and incorporates some of these same attributes that were
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earlier denied or ignored such as his parents’ own life stories. Particularly in his
reassessment of the social condition of Chicanos in California, he appears to
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shift from an exclusionary to an inclusionary paradigm that at least for him makes
more sense.
While Rodríguez’s life-writing focuses on California, John Phillip Santos’s two
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books, Places Left Unfinished at the End of Creation: A Memoir and The Farthest Home
Is an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy chronicle his family’s story in San Antonio,
South Texas and Northern Mexico. The subtitles indicate that Santos’s first book

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is a memoir, while creating a fictional narrator from the future for the second; his
books can be classified as family life-writing for he is in effect telling the story of his
paternal and maternal lines, respectively, in the books. These works, told in a rich
and evocative prose, are not working class but still retain a stance of resistance to the
hegemonic historical account of Texas history.
Chicanas tell a very different story in texts such as Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street,
Pat Mora’s Nepantla: Stories from the Land in the Middle and Ana Castillo’s Massacre
of the Dreamers, Denise Chávez’s A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and
Culture (2006), in addition to the already mentioned Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza (1987) by Gloria Anzaldúa. They stand in sharp contrast to the stories found
in Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running: Mi Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA (1990) and
his most recent It Calls You Back (2011), and Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A
Place to Stand. However, they all, in one way or another, address the subalternity of
the writers’ lives. Castillo’s proposal of a term, Xicanisma, to mark indigenous ori-
gins for Chicanas, blends historical and feminist philosophical essays through a
first-person narrative that according to C. Alejandra Elenes can be classified as
autobiography.

Oral autobiography and as-told-to testimonios

In his article on Mexican autobiography, Woods conflates testimonio and as-told-to

narratives with “oral autobiography” and claims that such works generally rely on
the interlocutor who collects the story, either an anthropologist or a scholar
(1994: 755). Such mediated narratives abound in Latino/a and Chicano/a life-writing.
Unlike Elva Treviño Hart’s self-authored story of working in the fields, Barefoot
Heart (1999), Maria Elena Lucas tells her story through Fran Leeper Buss who edits
and introduces Forged Under the Sun: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas (1993); and
Mario Garcia’s Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman
works with Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, for example, to produce her life-writing.
Yet, another example of the way that as-told-to stories are being reformulated occurs
in Yolanda Broyles-González’s book Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music/La Historia de
Lydia Mendoza (2003) as Mendoza’s own voice emerges and the scholar’s commen-
tary is limited to an academic essay. It is a personal narrative collected as an oral
history over a period of time via interviews conducted by Broyles-González with the
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legendary singer. The book’s format is also unique in that it presents the English
translation, followed by the Spanish original in Mendoza’s own words. The book
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ends with an extended essay on the significance of Mendoza’s career and her place in
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Tejana music and Chicana studies by Broyles-González. The inclusion of a CD of

Mendoza singing her most popular selections adds to the unique treatment of this
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life story. I remember being pleasantly surprised to read my beloved South Texas
Spanish in the book and even more so listening to the CD; it was a different kind of
life-writing that, while mediated at some level by Broyles-González, didn’t feel as an
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as-told-to story. Even in this kind of mediated narrative, the Chicana interlocutor
takes a different route and, honoring the voice and story, allows Mendoza to be at
the center.

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The border

Impelled by the desire to chronicle injustice and to tell the story of an oppressed
community, many writers of autobiography, memoir, and testimonio tell their per-
sonal story as exemplum of what many others have endured. One particular site of
oppression also critical to a discussion of autobiography and memoir is the border
between Mexico and the US, as Juan Velasco in his essay Automitografías notes: “For
Chicana/o cultural critics, the border paradigm has defined the boundaries of writing
and experience in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography” (Velasco 2004: 313). He
further contends that, “The automitografías constructed by these (border) voices
challenge patriarchy, heteronormativity, imperialism, and white supremacy in the
historical and sociopolitical context of the border” and that they “also reclaim
border theory from the dehistoricized applications to which it has been so widely
put in many areas of the humanities” (Velasco 2004: 315). I offer the case of Laredo,
Texas where many self-authored life stories exist, written by subjects who could be
placed anywhere on the social spectrum and who do not have any affiliation with the
local university or the college. I choose to highlight three such life-writings. Norma
Zúñiga Benavides’s Holidays and Heartstrings: Recuerdos de la Casa de Miel (1995),
co-authored with her sister Blanca Azíos, tells the story of a house and almost reads
like a scrapbook as she embellishes the narrative with photos and mementos. Belia
Salinas Valle’s transnational odyssey, Mi Infancia Peregrina (no date), extends to
both sides of the border as she tells of her childhood as an orphan with a mean
stepmother. Hilario Coronado Cuello writes his Memorias (1988) in verse! The
autobiography includes poems to his family, of course, but also to his pets. Maybe it
is because of Laredo’s location on the border and the accessibility to publishers in
Nuevo Laredo that these self-authored books exist. Perhaps the one author whose
work most impacts contemporary border studies has been Anzaldúa.

Latina and Chicana: Feminist life-writing

This brings us to Latina/Chicana authors who have set out to push the boundaries of
the genres and to insert self-authored discussions that produce knowledge while
firmly grounding their narratives within their community’s story. In Paths to Discovery:
Autobiographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science and Engineering
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(Cantú 2007), I gathered the autobiographical essays of ten women whose stories
merited telling; their life-writing attested to what Rina Benmayor, a member of the
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Latina Feminist Group writes in her online article, that “Latina autobiographical
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narratives … [are] testimonial responses to historical, cultural, and ideological

oppressions” (Benmayor 2011). Gloria Anzaldúa’s signature mixed genre (auto-
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biography, memoir, and testimonio) that she called “autohistoria” and “autohistoria-
teoría” is amply dealt with in her work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), and in essays
included in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Keating 2009). Bergland (1994) calls Border-
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lands, “Striking” among autobiographical texts, for she claims that it “challenges our
thinking about all kinds of borders – national, linguistic, social and cultural,
gendered – as it crosses multiple borders, forcing us to explore marginal spaces bell

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hooks imagined” (1994: 90). She further suggests that Anzaldúa’s anthologizing proj-
ects constitute “an ongoing, collective autobiography of women of colour, narratives
in opposition to multiple oppressions” (1994: 90). Most critically, as Lourdes Torres
points out:

Autobiographical works provide a window into the socially and historically

constructed world of a community, and help to illuminate the conditions
that its members inhabit and transform. Memoirs, particularly memoirs by
women of color who are multiply positioned in complex worlds, provide an
alternative to mainstream masculinist conceptions of culture and politics.
(Torres 2009: footnote 104)

Expanding on the idea of a collective autobiography, I venture to agree with other

scholars of Chicana autobiography such as C. Alejandra Elenes (2000). For many
Chicana and Latina authors, writing personal memoir or autobiography constitutes
an exercise in communal storytelling insofar as many of our stories cut across age,
geography, and even gender and tell a shared story of injustice and prejudice. One
such experience would be what Anzaldúa has labeled “linguistic terrorism,” that is,
the experience of being punished for speaking one’s home language in the public
sphere. John Beverley, the eminent scholar of testimonio literature, brilliantly
defines the genre and engages the reader or the intended audience of the Latin
American testimonio in his numerous publications on the subject. In Telling to Live:
Latina Feminist Testimonios (2001), the Latina Feminist Group expands Beverley’s
definition and his views and situates the discussion squarely in the academic terrain
he first contends is the audience for a testimonio. In the Introduction, the group
writes of how it arrived at the conclusion that “despite its complicated history,
testimonio captures Latinas’ layered complicated lives” (Latina Feminist Group
2001: 19).
The differences that exist between the latinidades present in the Latina Feminist
Group mirror those that exist in the larger US terrain with its numerous and com-
plex latinidades. From the Central American testimonios of Elva Alvarado and
Rigoberta Menchú to the Chicana texts that Theresa Delgadillo studies in her book
Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narra-
tive (2011), women’s life stories that tell of survival strategies, what is at stake is
women’s ways of knowing and of speaking from that knowledge; the texts reveal
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varied and multiple purposes for such life-writing. While for Beverley, testimo-
niantes write (or tell) their story with the intention of impelling the audience to
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action; for the testimoniantes themselves the exercise is an act of healing; the very
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act of writing of survival serves as a healing and allows the author a space for trans-
cendence. The Latina Feminist Group writes: “Each of us in this book has a com-
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plex story about our mestiza inheritances that defy simplistic explanation – stories
about living on the borders of various classes, nations, regional cultures, languages,
voices, races, ethnicities, migrations, sexualities, creative abilities, academic dis-
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ciplines, and even cultures of resistance” (2001: 25). And the stories attest to the
struggle and the technologies of oppression under which the authors functioned,
survived, and continue to survive.

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Thus, testimonio broadly defined is not limited to subaltern subjectivity in the

traditional sense of the word, but it may inclusively embrace all life-writing that tells
of survival and of transcendence over oppressions. As in autobiography, the narra-
tor may occupy an elite or subaltern position that is fluid and that may shift
according to the situation. So, Jorge Prieto’s privileged position in Mexico may shift
to one of poverty in South Texas and then again to that of a medical doctor in
Chicago; the narrator of a testimonio may be, as Beverley first described, someone
whose subalternity is fixed, or it may be as he later elaborated, one who shifts to a
position of what he refers to as an organic intellectual (1993). The fact that the Latina
Feminist Group includes Latinas from numerous latinidades, and that the project
sought to find new ways of theorizing our condition as Latinas in the United States,
forces readers to consider the incredible accomplishment it was to bring together the
writers and to produce the document that attests to the lives of Latinas and to
the trajectories lived by them within the United States. One of their goals was to
spread the practice across disciplines and across ethnic groups. As Rina Benmayor
points out:
Most Latina autobiographical narratives are positioned … as testimonial
responses to historical, cultural, and ideological oppressions. Many new
cultural theories have emerged from this process. For example, I commonly
refer to how the now widely invoked concepts of “borderlands” and
“intersectionality” emerged from women of color and Latina feminist
writings.
(Benmayor 2011)
She further explains that Anzaldúa theorized “the concept of borderlands as a geo-
graphical, cultural and historical space, where dominant and subordinated cultures
intersect” (Benmayor 2011).

Conclusions

Autobiographies, memoirs, and testimonios in Latino/a literature, as we have seen,

offer a myriad of experiences and are rooted in the poetry of indigenous peoples that
stretches back to pre-conquest times and comes into its own in the mid-nineteenth
century with Mexico’s losing of the US-Mexico war and ceding more than half
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its territory to the US. In contemporary writing we find other issues emerge, such as
sexuality. Lourdes Torres’s article, “Queering Puerto Rican Women’s Narra-
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tives: Gaps and Silences in the Memoirs of Antonia Pantoja and Luisita López
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Torregrosa” (2009), deftly unpacks the autobiographies by two prominent Puerto

Rican women whose lesbian identity has remained veiled while not denied. Pantoja
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does mention her same-sex partners but only a reader who is looking for clues will
read between the lines and understand that she is talking about the women she lived
with and that she is coming out. Most importantly, Torres’s astute analysis of
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the life-writing of these two lesbians sheds light on the dearth of coming-out stories
or of serious study of lesbian life-writing especially autobiography and testimonio
that would offer strong narratives of survival and of transcendence. Whether

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working-class stories of struggle against oppression or narratives by privileged nar-

rators whose lives change and must survive the racism or prejudice of life in the
United States, they tell stories of survival. Particular identities, cultures, locations, or
power structures shape the form and content of life-writing. It is through the authors
situating their story within a particular location, i.e. the border, or by focusing on
key events in their life-formation or their negotiating power structures within the institu-
tions, be they educational, medical, legal, or governmental, and of course their latinidad,
the allegiance to their cultural identity that their life-writings will reveal how these
have impacted them and that offer a blueprint for the reader who identifies with the
situation and thus the life-writing serves as a mentoring purpose, an incentive to
keep going, to keep trying. On the other hand, if the reader is not of the culture and,
as an outsider, does not empathize or know the experience narrated in the life-writing,
it becomes merely entertainment; the testimonio does not achieve one of its goals, to
change the hearts and minds of the reader, and impel them to social action.
It is with humility and fear that I have not done the subject justice that I conclude
this chapter, and I turn once again to the Latina Feminist Group and their incredible
feat of uniting across latinidades and through a process of alchemy creating a space
for Latinas to articulate, as testimoniantes, their desires and hopes. They provided
and still provide a space for each and every one of them to tell their life story with
trust and total confidence in each other’s unwavering support: “With each experience
put into words we have initiated the transmutation necessary for our own joyous
well-being” (Latina Feminist Group 2001: 168). In like fashion, the thousands of
Latinos/as and Chicanos/as who have written their story, who have put into words
their experience as Latinos/as and/or Chicanos/as, as mestizos/as, “have initiated the
transmutation necessary for our [collective] joyous well-being”; they have added to
our strength, for what affects one of us affects the whole.

Suggested further reading

Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Augenbram, H. and Stavans, I. (eds) (1993) Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories, New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Beverley, J. (2004). Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Cárdenas, J.A. (1997) My Spanish Speaking Left Foot, San Antonio, TX: Intercultural Development
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Research Association.
Latina Feminist Group (2001) Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, Durham, NC: Duke
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University Press.
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Latorre, S. (2006) “Creative Memories: Genre, Gender and Language in Latina

Autobiographies,” Life Writing, 3: 61–79.
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Thomas, P. (1967) Down These Mean Streets, New York: Alfred A. Knopf (30th Anniversary
Edition, 1997, New York: Vintage).
Torres, L. (1996) “The Construction of the Self in US Latina Autobiographies,” in A. Garry
and M. Pearsall (eds) Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy,
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Routledge: New York, 127–44.

Velasco, J. (2004) “Automitografías: The Border Paradigm and Chicana/o Autobiography,”
Biography, 27(2): 313–38.

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