Unthinkable Stories: Reading for Justice in Testimonial Migration Narratives

37 pagesThis thesis defines the literary genre of testimonio in the context of the United States/Mexico border and the humanitarian crisis of Central American migration in the last two decades. To explore questions of how testimonio operates to access truth, justice, and its ability to disrupt readers’ understanding, I close read passages from two migration narratives: Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli and The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martínez. These two authors employ many different rhetorical strategies to advance the goals of their texts, but the ideas I focus on close reading include: the “unthinkable,” the concept of storytelling and narrativization, and the role of the author as a mediator of testimonio to their audience. There are many contradictions present in testimonio: the blurring between fact and fiction, the impossibility of objective retelling and resulting subjectivity of experience and the tension between the literary and the literal. I do not aim to resolve this tension; rather to dive into its complexity to recover sites of reading truth and justice in new ways