ABSTRACT
Although grateful for the opportunity to share our experiences in a public forum, we had not anticipated the profound emotional, intellectual, and healing connections that emerged. We, together with the audience, enacted resistance by transforming silence into language (Anzaldu´a, 1990) and transgressed the boundaries of an academic, “mainstream” space. By making public those private stories of pain, triumph, uncertainty, conviction, and growth, we wove the strands of lived experience along with sitios (spaces) of contention (Hurtado, 1998) to “translate ourselves for each other” (Latina Feminist Group, 2001, p. 3). As we interpreted how our established colegas made sense of these translations, affirming and challenging the ways in which we perceived ourselves in each other, we realized the power of intersectional dialogue. Through this exchange we uncovered a process within the method of testimonio that mirrors the (un)conscious, “the inner faces, las caras por dentro” (Anzaldu´a, 1990, p. xxvii) among our collective. We refer to this process as reflexio´n, one that allows us to analyze and interpret our individual testimonios as part of a collective experience that reflects our past, present, and future, thus moving us toward a collective consciousness.
