This article presents the testimonios of two high school girls coming of age in one of the most marginalized areas of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico who attend a school with a critical pedagogy orientation (Freire, 1970). Ciudad Juarez is a city on the U.S-Mexico border and considered one of the most violent in the world today. These testimonios shed light on the life experiences and identity formation of young women coming of age in the south side of the border and reveal the knowledge and wisdom they have gained in their struggle for freedom, dignity, and life. They also expose the epistemological and pedagogical nature of young women's discourse and wisdom characterized by testimonios as counter-narratives, confessions, and consejos; and the role of a critical school in promoting such discourse. This article offers insight into the potential of schools to become sites of organic healing, critical consciousness, and agency in dystopic times by cultivating the use of testimonios as a way to center and legitimize ...

methods

Schooling in Times of Dystopia: Empowering Education for Juarez Women

Testimonios of Life and Learning in the Borderlands: Subaltern Juárez Girls Speak

Drawing upon multisited ethnographic case studies in the United States and Mexico, I demonstrate sobrevivencia, a survivalist way of knowing of Mexican-origin families. Through an underdog mentality, family members persisted and sometimes thrived. However, the grittiness of the underdog mentality did not always work out. By understanding sobrevivencia, educators can better engage transnational families, and researchers can further explore transnational ways of knowing with continuing multisited research.

"The Only Mexican in the Room": "Sobrevivencia" as a Way of Knowing for Mexican Transnational Students and Families.

Accounts of the feminicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico tend to emphasize the youth and vulnerability of the victims. Often, however, as these representations focus on the relationship between the border, capitalism and gendered labor, they also perpetuate portrayals of the victims as subaltern, innocent girls, and fail to examine the relationship between class and citizenship, or the border between girlhood and womanhood. Through reading Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s (2005) Desert Blood, Stella Pope Duarte’s (2008) If I Die in Juarez and Amalia Ortiz’s (2006) “Women of Juarez” in conversation with scholarship and media accounts of the murders, I trouble the classed border between girlhood and womanhood that much discourse about the Juarez murders straddles without interrogating. By also drawing on scholarly discussions and popular print accounts (that is from Texas Monthly and Ms.), I argue that depictions of the victims demonstrate an anxiety about the borders of girlhood as US assumptions about girls depend upon a middle-class security to which the girls in Juarez do not have access.

Schooling in Times of Dystopia: Empowering Education for Juarez Women

Citations

Testimonios of Life and Learning in the Borderlands: Subaltern Juárez Girls Speak

"The Only Mexican in the Room": "Sobrevivencia" as a Way of Knowing for Mexican Transnational Students and Families.

Constructing girlhood, narrating violence: Desert Blood, If I Die in Juárez, and “Women of Juárez”

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