









































Testimonios of (In)Justice and 
Communal Spaces: Four Latinas  
in Their First Year Teaching

Authors 
TERESA SOSA Associate Professor, Elementary Education, IU School of Education, IUPUI

keywords 
Latina teachers, testimonio, communal spaces, 
Latina womanist epistemology, first year teachers, 
convivencia

 
abstract 
In August 2020, four Latinas began their first 
year teaching and entered a school system that 
continues to emphasize policies, measures, and 
curriculum that supports racism and social 
injustice. Their first-hand experiences included 
a pandemic that largely challenged modes of 
delivery in schools and the lack of access for 
students of marginalized communities that made 
existing disparities even more obvious. But they 
also entered teaching at a time when there was 
renewed interest in openly pushing issues of race, 
oppression, and violence to the forefront. This 
article details how these four Latina teachers 
connected their testimonios to the current 
sociopolitical realities and to their commitment 
to social change through monthly zoom chats. 
Their chats became spaces of Convivencia, a way 
to engage, reflect, and support each other that is 
centered within a Latina womanist epistemology. 
Cultural Intuition was used to analyze their 
experiences and to point out key aspects of their 
testimonios that reflect their ways of knowing 
and agency. This piece concludes by making a 

case for how these types of communal spaces are 
necessary across various institutions and spaces 
for Latinas. 
 
introduction 
In August 2020, four Latinas with a recently 
earned Bachelors in Elementary Education began 
their first year teaching. They entered a school 
system that continues to emphasize policies, 
measures, and curriculum that supports racism 
and social injustice. Their first-hand experiences 
included a pandemic that largely challenged 
modes of delivery in schools and the lack of access 
for students of marginalized communities that 
made existing disparities even more obvious. But 
they also entered teaching at a time when there 
was renewed interest in openly pushing issues of 
race, oppression, and violence to the forefront. 
As one of their previous literacy professors and 
a fellow Latina, all four agreed to begin their 
teaching profession with a commitment to share 
their experiences with each other and to allow me 
to document their first year teaching via monthly 
zoom gatherings. The teachers connected their 
politically urgent stories—their testimonios—
to the current sociopolitical realities and to 
their commitment to social change through 
the monthly chats. This work makes a case for 
how the zoom monthly chats became spaces of 
convivencia (communalism, coming together)-

68ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E



-a way to engage, reflect, learn, and support each 
other in a way that is deeply centered within a 
Latina womanist epistemology. 

In this work, I first describe what encompasses 
Latina womanist epistemology and communal 
mentoring. I then describe our relationship and 
introduce the four teachers and provide my 
positionality. Cultural intuition and testimonio are 
then described along with making a case for how 
communal mentoring is inextricably connected 
to testimonio and how I analyzed their shared 
experiences through the standpoint of Cultural 
Intuition (Bernal, 1998). I then share some key 
aspects of their testimonios reflective of their 
ways of knowing and agency from their first year 
teaching (2020-2021 school year); I end this piece 
with our work moving toward building a communal 
approach to solidarity and shared commitments 
through expanding our communal mentoring and 
support and making a case for how these types 
of communal spaces are necessary across various 
institutions and spaces for Latinas. 
 
latina womanist epistemology 
and communal mentoring 
Mentoring for women and minoritized groups 
does not ascribe to rigidly defined roles of mentor 
and mentee, rejects similarly defined positions 
of power (Mendez-Morse, 2004), and interrupts 
assumptions of hierarchical knowledge where 
one individual holds more or more important 
knowledge than others. Thus, mentorship within 
communal spaces is understood as learning, 
engagement, and reflection where all members 
are both mentors and mentees and for Latinas, 
“mentorship includes communal methods of 
support through testimonios, or testimonies that 
recognize ‘the power and empowerment of sharing 
our papelitos guardados [literally, guarded papers] 
in and out of academia with others’” (Duran, 
2016, p. 114). In Latina mentoring, convivencia 

or communalism is a central aspect of a raced-
gendered epistemology that expands traditional 
notions of teaching, learning, and creation of 
knowledge (Galvan, 2001).

Latina womanist epistemology is an explicitly 
critical race-gendered stance grounded in lived 
realities of Latinas (Delgado Bernal, 2002). This 
epistemology has pedagogical power that is 
exercised in the sharing of Latinas’ testimonios 
and histories and serves as “a knowledge base 
to understand, critique, and challenge systemic 
oppression and theorize identity, sexuality, the 
body, resistance, healing, transformation, and 
empowerment” (Huber & Cueva, 2012, p. 395). 
Convivencia is about how to be together, the 
communal and relational, amid systemic racism, 
oppression and uncertainty (Villenas, 2005). 
Convivencia is central to Latina mentoring as it 
emphasizes cultural ways of knowing and giving 
voice to lived experiences. 

The term “womanist” is central to this 
epistemology or way of knowing. Womanist, 
unlike the term feminist, addresses the racial, 
classed, and gendered intersections of women of 
color, and in this work, of Latinas specifically. A 
womanist orientation to the world is based on the 
socio-cultural and historical conditions affecting 
Latinas as race-gendered persons. Thus, the term 
womanist centers Latina’s race/culture-gender 
positionalities, that is, how they make sense of and 
navigate experiences and how they express and 
communicate their lived realities.

Latina womanist epistemology and pedagogies 
derive from Galvan’s (2001) work with Mexicana 
campesinas and extend our understanding of 
these women’s knowledge “by situating it among 
groups of people traditionally unheard and spaces 
continually unexplored” (Bernal, 2002, p. 607). 
Latina womanist pedagogies have been central 
in research, including among a group of Latina 

69 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E



immigrant mothers (Delgado-Gaitan, 2012), 
and more recently among Chicanas/ Latinas at 
a Hispanic Serving Institution (Ek et al., 2010), 
and among Latinas at a predominantly white 
institution (Flores & Garcia 2009). This literature 
emphasizes the pedagogical value of these diverse 
womanist sites as they provide communal spaces 
for Latinas to gain confidence, provide guidance, 
and reassert their own power (Villenas, 2005). 

I build on this work by indicating how the four 
Latina first year teachers that are the focus of 
this work exercised their womanist epistemology 
via zoom turned communal spaces through 
sharing their testimonios. Revealed through this 
epistemology are the human relationships and 
experiences that are not visible from a Eurocentric 
epistemological orientation. Related, this 
standpoint asserts that first year Latina teachers 
both carry the wisdom of our ancestral knowledge 
(Castillo, 1994) and are creators of knowledge 
(Bernal, 2002). Positioning teachers as knowledge 
holders and creators (Bernal, 2002) is intentional. 
Such emphasis counters current dominant 
deficit ideology of teachers that deskills, de-
professionalizes, and deintellectualizes educators. 

Delgado-Gaitan (2012) makes a case that 
transformation is dynamic and collective. 
Convivencia is central to personal and social 
transformation as Latinas share, learn, and 
account their refusals of dehumanizing relations/ 
encounters they experience in institutions and 
the larger society. For these four Latinas, the 
communal space served to cope with issues of the 
pandemic, their first year teaching, and the ever 
present oppression and racism in schools—both 
for them as Latinas as well as for their Brown and 

Black students. The sharing of their testimonios 
within a communal womanist space allowed for 
connections across our Latininades and to learn 
from each other, a convivio (Villenas, 2005) that 
encompasses pain, anger, sorrow, laughter, and 
love.

how i came to know the 
teachers 
Ms. Julia Rose Raymond, Ms. Mariana Calderon, 
Ms. Seci Ann Gonzales, and Ms.  Ruby Sanchez 
are all recent graduates (2019 and 2020) of the 
Urban Elementary Education Program at a large 
PWI in the Midwest where I teach. We got to know 
one another through a literacy methods class I 
was teaching as part of their teacher preparation 
program. We began to share our experiences with 
each other and they felt a connection to me and 
my course as it centers ways to fully engage with 
students and support their capacity to thrive by 
attending to meaningful relationships and critical 
pedagogy.

We connected as Latinas which is a sense of 
historical recognition and of shared wisdom and 
refusal in the face of ongoing oppression. I am one 
of the very few Latina teachers they had in their 
K-16 trajectory. Thus, the ways in which I identify, 
honor my language of origin, and my stance on 
how our experiences of being “othered” can help 
us to refuse such mistreatment of our students 
allowed us to connect through identity, ideologies, 
and commitment to service. Our relationship 
developed through shared chats before and after 
school, texts, meals, phone calls and other support 
including writing reference letters on their behalf 
(e.g., scholarships, job applications) and through 
guidance while facing difficult student-teaching 

70ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E 

1 Latinidad describes ‘any person currently living in the US of Spanish-speaking heritage from more than 30 Caribbean and Latin Amer-
ican countries’ (Molina Guzman and Valdivia 2004, 207). Latinidades expands beyond ‘nationality and ethnicity’ to include cultural 
experiences and political commitments’ and acknowledge differences across race, class, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, ‘regional 
variations’, and mixed cultural heritage (The Latina Feminist Group 2001 as cited in Flores & Garcia, 2009, p. 170).



racist-centered experiences. Their consistent 
support of me included constant comments of 
appreciation and acknowledging my strengths as 
a teacher educator and Ms. Raymond writing a 
letter on my behalf for a Diversity Scholar Award. 
Thus, in many ways, the testimonios are indicative 
of our historical and cultural circumstances 
and experiences as well as our present ongoing 
convivencia. 
 
 

Our relationship as five Latina educators developed 
into communal mentoring and support  when  
they began their first year teaching and all four 
agreed to document our monthly chats via 
zoom. Now in their second year as teachers, 
their firm commitment to this work continues as 
addressing pressing issues of inequality, racism, 
and oppression—not only for students but also 
for Latina educators like themselves—has become 
more urgent and as they look to supporting other 
Latina teachers entering the field.  

las maestras 
Ms. Calderon, Ms. Gonzales, Ms. Raymond, and 
Ms. Sanchez (see Table 1) are the four teachers. 
They identify as female and all are in their 20s. 
In order to resist the notion of the “essentialized” 
Latina (Duran, 2016) and because identity is 
fluid and heavily contextually based (Holland et.al., 
2001), I provide various ways and contexts  in 
which teachers self-identify in Table 1 below 
  
 

The four teachers began their first year teaching 
in August, 2020 in different schools. Ms. Gonzales 
and Ms. Sanchez accepted their positions before 
they graduated and Ms. Calderón and Ms. 
Raymond were offered their current positions days 
before the school year began. Ms. Calderón  and  
Ms. Sanchez teach 3rd grade in the same township 
and both are part of the Dual Language (DL)  
 
 

71 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E

Table 1: First-year Latina teacher's self -identification



Program at their respective schools. Ms. Raymond 
teaches in a different township and teaches reading 
and social studies to 5th graders. Ms. Gonzales 
teaches in a laboratory school associated with a 
large university in the state’s capitol. She teaches  
cience to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders (see Table 1 
above). 
 
As first-year teachers, they had to learn the 
practices of their specific schools and navigate 
the constant changes due to the pandemic. They 
had to adapt to being physically in the classroom 
with students, online, back in class, and back 
online. They had to figure out how to teach those 
physically in their classroom while engaging those 
attending class remotely. They had to learn to keep 
gradebooks, provide tests, and create curriculum 
and lesson plans all the while concerned about 
their students, trying to develop relationships 
with them, and navigating power struggles, 
microaggressions, and criticism. But they also 
had opportunities to build strong connections 
with peers, bond with mentors, feel support, and 
develop strength and certainty in their positions. 
Each also experienced first-hand what it means 
to be subjected to unequal distribution of power 
and privilege, pushback against what matters in 
teaching (relationships, truly listening to students, 
enhancing what students know and what matters 
to them) in favor of pragmatics of teaching, and 
how aims to counter inequities and racism are 
sidelined or reappropriated to reinscribe the 
colonialist project—their testimonios are indicative 
of this. 
 
professor 
I am Mexicana and of Nahua descent. I was born 
in Mexico and Spanish is my mother tongue. I 
have identified as Mexican-American, Hispanic, 
and Latina previously. I am still comfortable with 

Latina (with understandings of how Latinidad has 
been colonized—see Urrieta and Calderón, 2019) 
but no longer with Hispanic and specifically not 
with Mexican-American as I have come to realize it 
was a term I tended to use to convince others that 
I belonged here (multiple contexts) so I no longer 
use it. 

As a Latina scholar, I have a longstanding 
commitment to working with, teaching, and 
providing service to youth from historically 
underserved and marginalized communities in 
urban schools. I began this commitment as a 
high school English teacher for Chicago Public 
Schools. Serving largely Mexican and Puerto 

Rican communities as a teacher and mentor for 
eight years provided me with rich experiences that 
undergird my aim to engage in work that disrupts 
schooling practices, policies, and structures that 
fail to support or engage multiply marginalized 
youth. 
 
testimonio 
In its fullness, testimonio aims to “bring to light 
a wrong, a point of view, or an urgent call for 

72ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E

Each also experienced first-
hand what it means to be subject-

ed to unequal distribution of power and 
privilege, pushback against what matters in 

teaching (relationships, truly listening to stu-
dents, enhancing what students know and what 

matters to them) in favor of pragmatics of teach-
ing, and how aims to counter inequities and racism 
are sidelined or reappropriated to reinscribe the 
colonialist project—their testimonios are indica-
tive of this.

2All names are pseudonyms and chosen by the participants.



action….The testimonio is intentional and political” 
(Reyes & Curry Rodriguez, 2012, p. 525). While 
its origins center testimonio towards speaking 
on behalf of silenced people and their histories 
(Yúdice, 1991), it has more recently been used as 
a form of sharing of one’s lived experiences, all the 
while maintaining the explicit goal of highlighting 
the voice and agency of people toward building 
communal struggle for justice (Reyes, & Curry 
Rodríguez, 2012). Testimonio is a pedagogical 
tool, a politicized discourse that sheds light on the 
powerful womanist epistemologies and communal 
spaces that help Latinas resist oppression 
(Cervantes-Soon, 2012).

“Testimonio is [also] ‘a pedagogical, 
methodological, and activist approach to social 
justice that transgresses traditional paradigms 
in academia” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012, p. 
363). As such, testimonio situates the individual 
within a collective experience and provides new 
understandings of how Latinas, as racialized/ 
ethnicized women, conviven, come together, to 
build solidarity and bear witness to each other. 
Testimonios build bridges to Latinas’ collective 
power (Prieto & Villenas, 2012).

The testimonios by the four teachers act as 
constructions of self and contestation of power 
indicative in how they navigated their day-to-day 
experiences in their schools with their students, 
colleagues, and administration. To hear from their 
experiences is especially important as the 2020-
2021 school year was a year of a pandemic and 
concomitant exacerbated disparities along with a 
demand for social justice advanced by the Black 
Lives Matter movement. Their work is situated in 
schools as focal places for the racism, oppression, 
dehumanization that is seen in macro spaces that 
sustain police brutality, racist policies, poisonings 
(water, land, air) and at the same time serve as 
places of potential reckoning to resist subjugation 

and generate openings of alternate possibilities 
(Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2002). As such, their 
testimonios were meant to “document and inscribe 
into existence a social witness account reflective 
of collective experiences, political injustices, and 
human struggles that are often erased by dominant 
discourses” (Huber & Cueva, 2012, p. 393). Their 
testimonio, as a means for agency, is indicative of 
their profound sense of service and expands on 
what our elementary teacher education program 
focuses on—a deep understanding of the need for 
education that centers social/ racial justice. As 
such, their tellings of injustice and their response 
serve as testimonio; testimonio, by its definition, 
is a collective, political act of resistance (Anzaldúa, 
1990). To those ends, their testimonios shared 
in our communal space serve as examples of 
ways they resisted oppression, created spaces for 
ingenuity and sabiduria or wisdom (their students’ 
and their own), and enacted pedagogies that 
challenge colonizing practices.  
 
methodology 
Cultural Intuition as Methodology 
As Bernal (1998) asserts, “cultural intuition is a 
complex process that is experiential, intuitive, 
historical, personal, collective, and dynamic” (pp. 
567-568). As such, cultural intuition is both a 
methodological process and an epistemological 
standpoint that strategically and purposefully 
centers these four Latinas as knowledge holders 
and creators in the teaching profession.

Cultural intuition as a methodology centers all 
the varied ways we know (including through the 
body) and what we know as central to analysis. 
Hence, this methodology provides nuanced ways 
to understand their individual and collective 
similarities and differences in the lived realities of 
women from  similar political, ethnic, geographical, 
educational, generational, and professional 
backgrounds. The testimonios they shared 

73 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E



demonstrate “some of the ways in which their 
brown bodies experience the material realities 
of their context and whose experiences and 
narratives of survival, healing, and transformation 
embody consciousness, agency, and theory” (Cruz, 
2001). Similarly, cultural intuition allows me to 
center who I am, my embodied experiences, and 
shared history with these teachers as part of the 
methodological process.

Cultural intuition also includes participants in 
the data analysis process (Malagon, et al., 2009). 
This helps reject research/ participant roles and 
their often resulting hierarchical relationship. 
This process also provides participants the power 
to determine how they want to communicate 
their experiences and tellings. Thus, this 
methodology illuminated patterns of oppressive 
practices and structures as the teachers recounted 
their experiences. It also allowed for revealing 
contestation of such practices and structures 
through actions indicative of teachers’ varied 
ways of knowing. I present specific, individual 
experiences out of many that make up the kinds of 
experiences, refusals, and wisdom shared by this 
group.

Analysis  
When I realized that all four of my previous 
students would start teaching in August 2020, I 
invited them to monthly Zoom meetings to share 
their experiences. Our meetings had no specific 
questions although sometimes I would ask if they 
had anything in particular they wanted to share. 
They choose what they wanted to bring up and 
what to ask of each other. 

I analyzed their work from a Latina epistemology 
that grounds their life experiences as first year 
Latina teachers. I focused on how and what they 
chose to share, how they responded to each other 
and the ways their reactions, responses, and 
support built convivencia. I drew on sources of 

cultural intuition, including personal experience, 
literature on testimonio and Latina womanist 
epistemology, professional experience, and an 
analytical research process, to better understand 
the diversity and complexity of their experiences 
(Chang, 2017). 
 
testimonios 
In this section I provide shortened versions of 
testimonios by each of the teachers. My intention is 
not to exclude their voices through these retellings 
but rather provide a telling from each to get at 
the varied and complex situations that they had 
to attend to as Latina first year teachers. Their 
testimonios are meant to illustrate the necessity of 
communal mentorship and deep convivencia. In 
another piece (Sosa, in press), I focus more fully on 
their testimonios and center their voices. 
 
Administrative Moves that Maintain 
Inequity 
As stated previously, Ms. Calderón and Ms. 
Sanchez are both part of the Dual Language (DL) 
program in their district. They both are third 
grade teachers and teach in different schools. The 
district requires that teachers who are part of the 
DL program plan their weekly lessons together by 
grade level. For third grade, there are six teachers 
in all including Ms. Calderón, Ms. Sanchez, and 
another Latina teacher, Ms. Flores, along with 
three veteran White teachers. 

Both Ms. Calderón and Ms. Sanchez expressed 
challenges in their current position. For Ms. 
Calderón, the challenge has been in working with 
the three veteran teachers whose lack of input 
during planning meetings and lack of emphasis 
on student-centered curriculum may be outcomes 
of the limiting pervasive ideas some teachers 
seem to have about students in the DL program. 
For example, in exchanges with teachers in her 
school but who are not part of the DL program, 

74ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E 



Ms. Calderón has come to realize these teachers 
often believe students in the program do not know 
English and that they are “low performers.”

Despite efforts by Ms. Calderón to address the 
lack of input from the veteran teachers regarding 
lessons by talking with the school principal, no 
changes were instituted by administration that 
would make the planning more equitable for the 
teachers and relevant to the students. In fact, 
when Ms. Calderón, Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Flores 
began planning and enacting their own lessons, 
the director of the DL program made it clear 
they could not plan on their own. As opposed 
to addressing the actual issue indicated in Ms. 
Calderón’s comment, “Collaboration is difficult. 
It’s hard to work with people who just want to 
do the bare minimum;” the focus became the 
procedure that the novice Latina teachers were not 
following, instead of the focus being on inequitable 
practices of leaving the planning to the novice 
teachers, demanding so little of students based 
on the curriculum developed, and inaction and 
nonparticipation from the White teachers. 

When Ms. Sanchez shared her experience during 
our November meeting, she began by stating the 
following: “For me, this past week was kind of 
tough with the Dual Language team at my school 
because for the past few weeks we have felt very 
unsupported by administration. It all started from 
one day the second grade [monolingual] teachers 
complaining to our principal that they were feeling 
like they were not being invited [by the DL team] 
to docertain activities—cause the Dual Language 
program since it came to my school, they have 
always gone above and beyond like decorating and 
doing things for students…. So they complained to 
our principal and now like the Dual Language team 
isn’t allowed to do anything unless they invite the 
other teachers in our grade level."

 

The history of this ongoing tension, as Ms. Sanchez 
tells it, is that the monolingual teachers have 
always been invited to partake but would push back 
on certain activities, especially those that required 
staying after school. So the DL teachers stopped 
asking and continued to work on activities and 
decorations that celebrated their students.

The directive by the principal to include the other 
teachers feels like a lack of support for the DL team. 
What is striking for Ms. Sanchez is the apparent 
hypocrisy in the talking up of the DL program, 
including prominently displaying it on the school 
district’s site, and the lack of support for the Dual 
Language team. Giving in to the monolingual 
teachers’ demands and the lack of support for the 
Dual Language teachers helps maintain inequity. 
The insistence by monolingual teachers that they 
be included as long as they provide the terms of 
such inclusion and  the administration giving in to 
the pressure of this group while outwardly gaining 
recognition and receiving accolades for the strength 
of the Dual Language program serves to maintain 
the inequitable and racist structure that benefits 
White teachers.

The testimonios by Ms. Calderón and Ms. Sanchez 
reveal ingrained ideas about how much time 
and effort is enough to invest on students who 
are considered non-English speakers and “low 
performers.” It is also indicative of schools’ lack of 
investment in supporting their Latina teachers. To 
only focus on procedures, such as all DL teachers 
meet to create curriculum, negates the fact that the 
new Latina teachers are already doing most of the 
work as the others sit in silence or only participate 
if someone takes the lead. What is also telling is the 
exploitative dynamic constructed when a school 
emphasizes the importance and success of its DL 
program yet fails to support DL teachers in their 
interests, endeavors, and invites other teachers to 
join but on their terms, not the terms of the Latina 

75 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E



teachers. For Ms. Calderón and Ms. Sanchez, both 
action and inaction by administration supported 
inequitable practices that serve to maintain a racist 
system.

silenced voices and taboo 
topics 
Ms. Raymond 
Ms. Raymond’s testimonio was related to an 
experience that happened when she taught a lesson 
on the Second Amendment as part of her social 
studies curriculum. As Ms. Raymond discussed 
the Second Amendment, Mary, a White female 
student, expressed her view that Democrats 
wanted to take everyone’s guns away and that 
people needed guns in their home for protection. 
Ms. Raymond clarified that some people want 
to see laws passed that would make guns less 
accessible. Her statement was in support of her 
Black and Latinx students who felt angry and 
were concerned about the constant messages that 
Whites need to protect their home and property 
from criminals—that is, Black and Latinx youth/
men. As the lesson continued, Mary was visibly 
upset that there was opposition to her insistence on 
the freedom of owning guns. 

That same day, Mary’s parents reached out to 
Ms. Raymond and sent her their concerns via a 
messaging app the school uses for teachers and 
parents to communicate. Mary’s parents claimed 
that Mary felt Ms. Raymond was biased against 
her opinions and prevented her from stating them 
by not calling on her. Rather than asking Ms. 
Raymond about what the lesson entailed, they 
made it clear that they did not like that schools 
talked about politics or racism but understood 
that Ms. Raymond had a job to do. However, they 
continued, she should allow all students to speak  
their opinions, even if she doesn’t agree with them, 
which Ms. Raymond believes she does.

 

Mary’s parents insisted Ms. Raymond no longer 
speak to their child individually because she felt 
“threatened” by Ms. Raymond. They asked that 
the homeroom teacher, a White male teacher, be 
present during any one-on-one interactions with 
Mary moving forward. The principal agreed that 
the student should be accommodated, framing it as 
a way to “protect” Ms. Raymond from getting into a 

“she said, she said” situation with the student.

Ms. Raymond saw the principal’s decision as a 
move to undermine her position as a teacher. It 
also served to uphold the stereotype of Latinas as 
being loud, hot-tempered and volatile, as indicated 
in the suggestion that she made the student feel 
“threatened” and therefore the student should be 
protected by having a white male teacher present.

This incident highlights the inability of 
administration to hear Ms. Raymond’s side and 
support her as a knowledgeable and fair teacher, 
thus sustaining the view of Non-White teachers as 
inferior and affirming the insistence by Whites to 
be kept comfortable. Ms. Raymond was not only 
deprofessionalized, but the decision also that she 
should be supervised by a White male teacher  
 

76ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

What is also telling is the ex-
ploitative dynamic constructed 

when a school emphasizes the impor-
tance and success of its DL program yet 

fails to support DL teachers in their inter-
ests, endeavors, and invites other teachers 

to join but on their terms, not the terms of the 
Latina teachers. For Ms. Calderón and Ms. San-
chez, both action and inaction by administra-
tion supported inequitable practices that serve 
to maintain a racist system.

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E



clearly positioned her as someone who does not 
know how to behave and interact with White 
students.  
 
Ms. Gonzales 
Ms. Gonzales teaches 6-8th grade science. During 
one 6th grade science lesson that was fully online 
due to the pandemic, several Black girls began to 
comment on the hair of a White student, Amy, 
whose hair was braided in small cornrows with 
beads, seemingly in emulation of a hairstyle 
typically worn by Black girls. While Ms. Gonzales 
noticed Amy’s hairstyle also and was considering 
how to address it, one of her Black female students 
asked, “Ms. Gonzales, do you think Amy is 
culturally appropriating right now?” Ms. Gonzales 
wanted time to process the event and to talk with 
her school team about it so she told her students 
that these types of conversations are important and 
that they would address it in the coming days.

That day, Ms. Gonzales spoke with her team 
and the principal. Her team and the principal 
concluded that it was a conversation that obviously 
matters to their Black female students and that 
it should be discussed as soon as possible. Ms. 
Gonzales also reached out to Amy after school. The 
student explained that she loved her friend’s braids 
and wanted to style her hair the same way so she 
had her aunt do her hair. After watching a couple 
of videos and reading a book with Ms. Gonzales 
about Black hair, Amy came to realize how it could 
offend some of her Black peers. Ms. Gonzales also 
spoke with Amy’s mother who was supportive 
and understood why some Black students were 
offended.

The following day, Ms. Gonzales hosted a 
homeroom Zoom meeting with all 6th graders 
in order to address the situation; Amy and her 
mother were present. The discussion centered on 
how to call people out when something they say 

or do is offensive and how to do so with respect 
and kindness. The class discussed what it means 
to “pull people in” kindly into these kinds of 
conversations and not to single people out. 

Ms. Gonzales also explained how Black women’s 
hair has been discriminated against historically as 
well as in contemporary times. She also brought 
in opinions from Black friends and colleagues on 
how they feel about White people wearing Black 
hairstyles, as well as Tik Tok videos of people of 
color explaining whether they see it as cultural 
appropriation or not.

Ms. Gonzales reflected on this situation: “To be 
able to have those conversations and to be able to 
be so confident to have those conversations is huge. 
I actually got a lot of backlash from having that 
conversation with my 6 graders, not even from my 
team, but from other co-workers in my school. And 
so I had a lot of people saying that what I did was 
wrong and I don’t agree with that so, that’s hard to 
be told that what you did was wrong even though 
you know that what you did is exactly what you 
needed to do….”

As Ms. Gonzales sees it, these conversations are 
central to her role as a teacher and to social justice. 
She also sees how important it is to provide a 
space for the hurt and offensive feelings that her 
students of color felt. She emphasized that, “it 
was important  me to because it was important to 
them.” 

As these four testimonios indicate, these teachers 
needed to navigate difficult situations that 
questioned their ability (Ms. Raymond), ignored 
their insistence on designing engaging curriculum 
that matters to students (Ms. Calderón), 
positioned them as less important than their White 
counterparts (Ms. Sanchez), and that forced them 
to deal with backlash when teaching a lesson 
guide by equity and anti-racism (Ms. Gonzales). 

77 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E



In our zoom chats, these teachers found ways to 
share, support, and strengthen their commitment 
to social justice as well as validation across such 
varied experiences. These communal spaces are 
necessary for Latinas across all institutions and 
contexts. To this I turn next. 
 
expanding communal 
mentorship 
Convivencia emphasizes the collective nature of 
this group. For this group, the intimate community 
space they created allowed for openly dialoguing 
about embodied experiences because it did not 
require that they explain why they experienced 
the world in a certain way or worry about how 
they may be perceived. This led to continuous 
engagement in self-reflection and communal 
solidarity; it also led to healing through sharing, 
expressing, accounting, and relating.

Due to how this communal space and the process 
of testimonio allowed the teachers to see a more 
complete picture of systemic oppression Latinas 
experience in schools, Julia Rose, Mariana, Seci 
Ann, and Ruby were eager to support other Latina 
teachers who would be entering the field. We held 
an initial meeting with two Latina pre-service 
teachers in May 2021. In this meeting, they 
welcomed Ana and Lupe as kin; provided guidance, 
insights, and enveloped them in convivencia.

Their realization of the importance in welcoming 
other Latinas who are first year teachers into a 
communal space as necessary for their survival 
must be expanded by and for other Latinas as 
well. Communal spaces that support Latinas and 
nurture their womanist stance are instrumental 
to commitments of equity and social justice as the 
testimonios shared in these spaces are individual 
and at the same time collective. Forming new 
communal groups or expanding existing groups 
is necessary as all institutions must be challenged 

to end existing damaging policies, practices, 
and institutional norms and all Latinas deserve 
mentoring, support, and spaces for convivencia. 

The need to come together and collectively share 
experiences while establishing convivencia is 
strongly needed for Latinas in the teaching 
profession at all levels (early childhood, 
elementary, secondary, higher education) and at all 
stages of their careers (first year, novice, expert). 
These communal spaces and sharing of testimonios 
are rare in institutions and therefore this group can 
be viewed as one example of how to create such 
urgent spaces (even via zoom) as well as how to 
protect and sustain them. Thus, this work makes 
a case not only for expanding existing communal 
mentoring such as the one described here, but 
to guide and support other Latinas in starting 
communal mentoring in their own institutions 

and professions and with other Latinas across 
communities. As Sosa-Provencio and colleagues 
assert (2019), testimonios transcend the healing 
resistance for their authors. “Reverberating 
through their sacred narratives is a regenerative 
energy mending our collective histories and 
the fractures of invalidation which we as Latina 

78ENGAGE!  |  c r e at i v e  a rts

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E

Convivencia emphasizes 
the collective nature of this 

group. For this group, the intimate 
community space they created allowed 

for openly dialoguing about embodied 
experiences because it did not require 

that they explain why they experienced the 
world in a certain way or worry about how 
they may be perceived. This led to continuous 
engagement in self-reflection and communal 
solidarity; it also led to healing through shar-
ing, expressing, accounting, and relating.



scholars and educators live” (p. 223). Latinas 
sharing their personal histories and testimonios 
in convivencia is transformational (Alarcon et al, 
2011). 

Latinas must continue to find ways to create 
intimate community spaces, be it via zoom chats, 
in person, and other means such as gathering 
for meals. In the constant sharing of knowledge, 

approaches, and understandings, we deepen our 
refusal of the structures of colonization reinforced 
every day in institutions and in the broader society. 
And in full convivencia, we are able to draw from 
the wisdom of our ancestral knowledge (Castillo, 
1994) to an awareness of the relational, communal, 
and community history that connects us as Latinas 
(raced/gendered) and to our agentic commitments 
to change. 

79 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  1

T E R E S A  S O S A  | 
T E S T I M O N I O S  O F  ( I N ) J U S T I C E

References

Alarcón, W., Cruz, C., Guardia Jack-
son, L., Prieto, L., & Rodriguez-Arroyo, 
S. (2011). Compartiendo nuestras 
historias. Five testimonios of school-
ing and survival. Journal of Latinos 
and Education, 10(4), 369–381.

Anzaldúa, G. (1990). Introduction: 
Haciendo caras una entrada. In G. 
Anzaldúa  (Ed.), Making face, making 
soul (hacienda caras):Creative and 
critical perspectives by women of 
color (pp. xv–xxvii). San Francisco, 
CA: Aunt Lute Foundation.

Borrero, N. E., Flores, E., & de la Cruz, 
G. (2016). Developing and enacting 
culturally relevant pedagogy: Voices 
of new teachers of color. Equity & 
Excellence in Education, 49(1), 27-40.

Bernal, D. D. (1998). Using a Chicana 
feminist epistemology in educational 
research. Harvard educational re-
view, 68(4), 555-583.

Bernal, D. D. (2002). Critical race the-
ory, Latino critical theory, and critical 
raced-gendered epistemologies: Rec-
ognizing students of color as holders 
and creators of knowledge. Qualita-
tive inquiry, 8(1), 105-126.

Castillo, A. (1994). Massacre of the 
Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New 
York: Plume.

Cervantes-Soon, C. G. (2012). Tes-
timonios of life and learning in the 
borderlands: Subaltern Juárez girls 
speak. Equity & Excellence in Educa-
tion, 45(3), 373-391.

Chang, A. (2017). Un-American: Lati-
na high school students’ testimonios 
of American and white conflation in 
the middle of nowhere. Race Ethnicity 

and Education, 20(2), 240-251.

Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemol-
ogy of a brown body. International 
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Edu-
cation, 14(5), 657–669.

Delgado Bernal, D. (2002). Critical 
race theory, Latino critical theory and 
critical raced-gendered epistemolo-
gies: Recognizing students of color as 
holders and creators of knowledge. 
International Journal of Qualitative 
Studies in Education, 8(1), 105–126.

Delgado Bernal, D., Burciaga, R., and

Delgado Gaitan, C., (2012) Culture, 
Literacy, and Power In Family–Com-
munity–School–Relationships, Theo-
ry Into Practice, 51:4, 305-311, DOI:10.
1080/00405841.2012.726060

Duran, V. (2016). Mentorship and 
women of color in higher education: 
The stronger our voice, the greater 
impact we might forge. In Betty Taylor 
(Ed.), Listening to the Voices: Multi- 
ethnic Women in Education (pp 111 
- 118). San Francisco, CA: University of 
San Francisco.

Ek, L. D., Cerecer, P. D. Q., Alanís, I., 
& Rodríguez, M. A. (2010). “I don't 
belong here”: Chicanas/Latinas at a 
Hispanic serving institution creating 
community through muxerista men-
toring. Equity & Excellence in Educa-
tion, 43(4), 539-553.

Flores, J., & Garcia, S. (2009). Latina 
testimonios: A reflexive, critical anal-
ysis of a ‘Latina space’ at a predomi-
nantly White campus. Race Ethnicity 
and Education, 12(2), 155-172. 
 
Flores Carmona, J., (2012). Chicana-

Latina Testimonios: Methodologies, 
Pedagogies, and Political Urgency. 
Equity and Excellence in Education 45 
(3): 392–410.

Galvan R.T., (2001) Portraits of 
Mujeres Desjuiciadas: Womanist 
pedagogies of the everyday, the 
mundane and the ordinary, Interna-
tional Journal of Qualitative Studies 
in Education, 14:5, 603-621, DOI: 
10.1080/09518390110059856

Holland, D., Lachicotte Jr, W., Skinner, 
D., & Cain, C. (2001). Identity and 
agency in cultural worlds. Harvard 
University Press.

Huber, L. P., & Cueva, B. M. (2012). 
Chicana/Latina testimonios on ef-
fects and responses to microaggres-
sions. Equity & Excellence in Educa-
tion, 45(3), 392-410.

Malagon, M. C., Huber, L. P., & Velez, 
V. N. (2009). Our experiences, our 
methods: Using grounded theory to 
inform a critical race theory method-
ology. Seattle J. Soc. Just., 8, 253.

Mendez-Morse, S. (2004). Con-
structing mentors: Latina edu-
cational leaders’ role models and 
mentors. Educational Adminis-
tration Quarterly, 40, 561–590. 
doi:10.1177/0013161X04267112

Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (2002). 
This bridge called my back: Writings 
by radical women of color . Berkeley, 
CA.

Prieto, L., & Villenas, S. A. (2012). 
Pedagogies from Nepantla: Testimo-
nio, Chicana/Latina feminisms and 
teacher education classrooms. Equity 
& Excellence in Education, 45(3), 

411-429.

Reyes, K. B., & Curry Rodríguez, J. E. 
(2012). Testimonio: Origins, terms, 
and resources. Equity & Excellence in 
Education, 45(3), 525-538.

Sosa, T. In Press. Testimonios of 
Teaching from Four Latina First-Year 
Teachers. Race Ethnicity & Education.

Sosa-Provencio, M. A., Sheahan, A., 
Fuentes, R., Muñiz, S., & Prada Vivas, 
R. E. (2019). Reclaiming ourselves 
through testimonio pedagogy: Reflec-
tions on a curriculum design lab in 
teacher education. Race Ethnicity and 
Education, 22(2), 211-230.

Urrieta Jr, L., & Calderón, D. (2019). 
Critical Latinx Indigeneities: Un-
packing Indigeneity from within 
and outside of Latinized entan-
glements. Association of Mexican 
American Educators Journal, 13(2), 
145-174. http://dx.doi.org/10.24974/
amae.13.2.432 

Villenas, S. A. (2005). Latina literacies 
in convivencia: Communal spaces of 
teaching and learning. Anthropology 
& Education Quarterly, 273-277.

Yúdice, G. (1991). Testimonio and 
postmodernism. Latin American 
Perspectives, 18(3), 15-31.


