Chapter 3: Visual Testimonios: Artist/Writer Acts of Resistance and Recovery

Visual testimonios are a performative practice of nepantla, a creative act of living in-between worlds (Sotomayor & García, 2022). We theorize through performing image and text. A residue of the act of nepantla, we make our stories visual. Gloria Anzaldúa (1999, 2009, 2012) emphasizes that our stories, testimonios, autohistorias are performances—a collaborative effort between the reader and writer, and/or artist. Writing performatively is a feminist/artist/act—an embodiment of the self through visual text. Visual testimonios are a feminist methodology of decolonizing the self and bodies of knowledge. Using a visual language to share one’s testimonio, the artist/writer engages in autohistoria-teoría, theorizing through lived experience. Through a collaging of image and text, the maker/ performer navigates tense, ambiguous, and shifting borderlands spaces.