SPAN 330 - Hispanic Testimonials
Course Description: A course on individual and collective memoirs, diaries, confessions and traveling accounts. Students read and analyze written texts and films, keep journals, and create life writing or multimedia production in Spanish. Taught in Spanish.
Reflective Narrative:
In this MLO 3 class, Dr. Fernandez taught us about the Testimonios, which are narratives of events as told by a person who witnessed or experienced the event firsthand. For example, one of the books we read was titled Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú), a woman from Guatemala living under a brutal dictatorship and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos wrote down interviews with Menchú, describing the discrimination that the Maya-Quiché people were facing in the time. Our biggest assignment in class was to write a testimonio of our own. In small groups, we worked to interview a subject of the local community that was facing discrimination. We chose to discuss the story of a student who defines their gender identity as non-binary, neither male nor female. You can find this paper here, and read about the difficulties they have faced in their daily life as someone identifying outside of the cultural norm of male or female.
Overall, this was a wildly eye-opening class, as we read some truly despicable stories, like that of La Escuelita, or The Little School, a story of one woman's experiences during the dictatorship in the Argentinean Dirty War, as one of the kidnapped "disappeared" people. You can find a slideshow on this book that my group partners and I presented on here.
Reflective Narrative:
In this MLO 3 class, Dr. Fernandez taught us about the Testimonios, which are narratives of events as told by a person who witnessed or experienced the event firsthand. For example, one of the books we read was titled Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú), a woman from Guatemala living under a brutal dictatorship and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos wrote down interviews with Menchú, describing the discrimination that the Maya-Quiché people were facing in the time. Our biggest assignment in class was to write a testimonio of our own. In small groups, we worked to interview a subject of the local community that was facing discrimination. We chose to discuss the story of a student who defines their gender identity as non-binary, neither male nor female. You can find this paper here, and read about the difficulties they have faced in their daily life as someone identifying outside of the cultural norm of male or female.
Overall, this was a wildly eye-opening class, as we read some truly despicable stories, like that of La Escuelita, or The Little School, a story of one woman's experiences during the dictatorship in the Argentinean Dirty War, as one of the kidnapped "disappeared" people. You can find a slideshow on this book that my group partners and I presented on here.