Testimonio at 50

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Guadalupe Escobar
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988692
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20988692

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 237, Vol. 48 No. 2, March 2021, 17–32

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988692

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

17

Testimonio at 50

by

Guadalupe Escobar

A reassessment of the testimonio genre over the past five decades reveals continuities

of state-sponsored violence from the revolutionary period to the present. An analysis of

Pamela Yates’s 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) and Katia Lara’s Berta vive (Berta

Lives, 2016) shows Cold War reverberations, unfolding deeper histories of dispossession

and legacies of resistance. The first uncovers entangled issues of Guatemalan genocide

disavowal and extractive industry while the second denounces the political feminicide of

the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres. Both testimonial documentaries

mobilize an “archive effect” to contest the optic of colonial capitalism through the eco-

feminist perspectives of indigenous women activists.

Una reevaluación del género del testimonial durante las últimas cinco décadas revela

la continuidad de la violencia estatal desde el período revolucionario hasta el presente. Un

análisis de 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) de Pamela Yates y Berta vive (2016) de

Katia Lara da cuenta de las reverberaciones de la Guerra Fría, desplegando historias más

profundas de desposesión y legados de resistencia. La primera obra muestra los intrincados

hilos en torno a la negación del genocidio guatemalteco y la industria extractiva, mientras

que el segundo denuncia el feminicidio político de la activista ambiental hondureña Berta

Cáceres. Ambos documentales testimoniales utilizan un “efecto de archivo” para impug-

nar la óptica del capitalismo colonial a través de las perspectivas ecofeministas de las

activistas indígenas.

Keywords: Guatemala, Honduras, Testimonio, Indigenous feminisms, Documentary

film

Fifty years after its canonization, testimonio continues to hold enduring

significance in the twenty-first century. When Miguel Barnet won the 1970

Casa de las Américas prize for his 1966 Biografía de un cimarrón (Barnet, 1994

[1966]), relating the life story of the Afro-Cuban Esteban Montejo, it estab-

lished testimonio as a distinct genre. During the Cold War era, testimonio

came to be generally understood as a collective narrative of resistance to U.S.-

backed military dictatorships throughout the Americas. These past five

decades have seen testimonial criticism fluctuate from enthusiasm to enerva-

tion to resurged interest.

In many ways, Latin American Perspectives has been associated with some of

testimonio’s most important debates. In the early euphoric moment, for exam-

ple, Georg Gugelberger and Michael Kearney (1991) edited the double issue

Guadalupe Escobar is an assistant professor of English and of gender, race, and identity at the

University of Nevada, Reno. She thanks Georg M. Gugelberger, Kristi Wilson, and especially

Clara Garavelli for their incisive feedback.

988692LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20988692LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESEscobar / TESTIMONIO AT 50

research-article2021

18 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Voices of the Voiceless in Testimonial Literature. In it, George Yúdice (1991: 17)

offered a foundational definition of testimonio as “an authentic narrative, told

by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g., war,

oppression, revolution, etc.).” While many men have written testimonios (Che

Guevara, Eduardo Galeano), Nancy Saporta Sternbach (1991: 91), in

“Re-membering the Dead: Latin American Women’s ‘Testimonial’ Discourse,”

published in the same issue, attended to the gendered dimensions of the genre,

arguing that “military repression and authoritarian rule are no newcomers to

the Latin American political scene, but women’s open and direct opposition to

and participation in them is.” In short, testimonio has long been regarded as a

genre that subverts the silences of the otherwise absent. At issue, of course, has

been the degree to which mediation or editorial intervention may, in fact, repro-

duce subordination.

The 1990s marked a critical moment in testimonial debates with the Rigoberta

Menchú controversy and the transitional postwar period in Guatemala, El

Salvador, and elsewhere. Perhaps the most prominent voice in these debates

was that of John Beverley (1996: 281), who announced the demise of the genre:

“Testimonio’s moment, the originality and urgency or—to recall Lacan’s

phrase—the ‘state of emergency’ that drove our fascination and critical engage-

ment with it, has undoubtedly passed.” However, as Arturo Arias (2015: 253)

asserts, “If, as many US critics claim, the moment of testimonio is over, this is

mainly because the politics with which it was invested were conceived in the

United States in complete disregard of the real status of testimonial writing in

the continent.” In other words, testimonio’s epitaph revealed a limited U.S.-

centric understanding of the genre’s development. That testimonio persists is

evident through the continual awards for it by the Cuban cultural institution

Casa de las Américas. Whereas the testimonio of the revolutionary period

emphasized “the nature of form” and “forms of representation,” testimonio in

the current moment underscores “forms of memory” (Arias, 2015: 257).

I would like to use the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of testimonio to

reflect upon indigenous-women-centered environmentalisms in testimonial

documentaries. Whereas Michael Chanan (1997) situated cine testimonio within

the concientización aesthetics and radical tradition of the New Latin American

Cinema, Verónica Garibotto (2019: 174) has recently argued that testimonial

cinema, especially in the twenty-first century, has changed so much that what

once was the “subaltern” version of history has now become hegemonic. While

this shift may indeed be ideologically problematic, she concludes that “main-

taining hegemony is of utmost importance in order to ensure continuity of tri-

als, to help survivors reunite with families, and to make certain that atrocious

events will not be repeated.” Following both Garibotto’s and Chanan’s concep-

tion of testimonial cinema, I am interested in the ways in which the prosecution

of perpetrators decades after mass atrocities and the extractive boom have

added legal and ecocritical layers to today’s sense of testimonio. As I show

below, threats of state violence and extractive industry in recent years are com-

plexly interlinked to legacies of the Cold War. Just as the state once persecuted

the “communist,” so it now targets the environmentalist. Green has become the

new red.