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Testimonio, as a genre of the dispossessed, the migrant, and the queer, is a response to larger discourses of nation-building and has the potential to undermine the larger narratives that often erase and make invisible the expendable and often disposable labor and experiences of immigrants, the working class, African Americans, and others. This essay explores the use of testimonio in urban classrooms in Los Angeles and its use as a mediating tool in critical thinking and community based learning projects. I argue that there is a pedagogy to testimonio that is intersubjective and accessible and that, under certain circumstances, re-centers and revitalizes curriculum in this era of standardization and accountability, a hearkening to social justice movements that begin in education.From our different personal, political, ethnic, and academic trajectories, we arrived at the importance of testimonio as a crucial means of bearing witness and inscribing into history those lived realities that would otherwise succumb to the alchemy of erasure. (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001, p. 2) Before I became an education researcher, I was a radical teacher, a street outreach worker with LGBTQ youth, an HIV educator, a community organizer, and an activist. With this kind of mission came the commitment and the responsibility to work with and from the communities of people in ways that re-centered voice and story. In my work with young people, I thought about the best and most inclusive ways to develop sustainable leadership, reflexivity, and critical thinking, tools that helped the young people with whom I worked to think praxically and to begin analyzing our own and our sisters', brothers', and others' lived experiences. As a teacher, I wanted to make sense of what was happening in my own and the students' families, communities, and within our own bodies. We were practicing what Moraga (1981) calls "a theory in the flesh" (p. 23) and armed with Freire, Anzaldúa, Marx, safe sex education, liberation theology, harm reduction, and community-based learning, we began by interrogating the lived experience of our bodies, the stories that our bodies tell us through our scars and lesions (Cruz, 2001). In our sharing of critical stories, we practiced radical storytelling in the classroom. In this essay I examine the use of testimonio in urban classrooms with at-risk and LGBTQ youth, where the process of radical storytelling starts with an interrogation of our bodies. I begin with my story as a teacher in Los Angeles, California, one week after the civil unrest in Spring 1992.

In this ethnography of LGBTQ street youth, I argue that despite the regulation and containment of their bodies, queer street youth consistently create spaces of resistance that move them away from the tropes of infection, contamination, and deservedness that are inscripted onto the bodies of queer youth. Using the work of feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, this essay articulates a framework for resistance researchers -scholars who enact a "faithful witnessing" in solidarity with the communities they are describing, a movement away from the radical othering that often happens in social science research. It is in this positioning as a faithful witness that researchers can attend to the deconstruction of the discursive climates of deficit tropes that obscure the gestures and maneuvers of resistance. The tropes of contamination and irresponsibility intersect many of the experiences of LGBTQ street youth in ways that implicate not only LGBTQ street youth, but also other marginalized bodies.

This essay examines a video poem curriculum for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer 1 (LGBTQ) students of color at a continuation school in Los Angeles, California. In this close reading of a video poem that draws from a larger research project of a community-based learning curriculum, I have found that for LGBTQ students of color whose lives often intersect multiple oppressions, it is in the reflexive pedagogical work of "storying the self" (Goodson, 1998) where they develop a critical consciousness through an interrogation of their own bodies as they confront HIV, survival sex, and violence. The racially queered self/body, particularly in media work, becomes a rich representational tool used to facilitate reflection and praxical thinking about the multiple, often simultaneous experiences of Latino and African American LGBTQ students. It is in this pedagogical space where the urgency and necessity of a radical politic emerges from the analysis of intersection and intermeshment in student experiences, and where a "theory in the flesh" that is derived from youth bodies may literally save your own life. bs_bs_banner

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