ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines her testimonio as a Latina first-generation student in her first semester of graduate school. The purpose of this self-narrative qualitative inquiry is to understand the funds of knowledge and pedagogies of the home gained throughout her life as a Mexican-Honduran-American woman from a working-class immigrant community that allowed her to persist through her first semester. A Latina-Chicana feminist epistemology framework grounds the self-narrative. The testimonio is constructed from an analysis of weekly journal entries, collected over four months, personal statements from college applications, and creative work completed in a graduate class. Becoming at home in nepantla and finding counterspaces were critical to understand that a connection to her roots gave her the strength and guidance to persist in a predominantly white institution. The author/narrator highlights the role of her parents’ consejos and cariño and of her biculturalism. Teachers serving Latina students can take away from this testimonio the importance of narrative creation and sharing in their classrooms that unearths their students’ ancestral knowledges. Narrative writing can reveal to them Latina strength that they already possess to persist in predominantly white institutions.
