Troubling testimonio: radical moves in writing ethnographic inquiry with the H.I.J.O.S. de Peru group.

10 years after the Peruvian TRC published its Final Report on the two decades of violence (1980-2000) the struggles over memory continue. There are not only conflicting narratives on Peru's recent history but also several stories that remain absent from any report.

My project deals with a corner of those stories. It is an inquiry into the process of producing testimonio as collective memory work.  An activist-research engaged with a collaborative experiencia with a group of young people who call themselves HIJOS de Peru and whose parents were involved in the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) during the Peruvian armed conflict.

The inquiry lives in the contradiction between the ‘truth telling’ dimension of testimonio and the ‘after truth’ turn in social sciences. It ‘troubles’ (Lather 1997) normative conceptions of testimonio by re-visiting its practices over a 5-year period in two separate locations, and ‘troubles’ its process of becoming by using creative writing and playing with Anzaldúa’s ‘borderlands’ (1987) metaphor to explore testimonio as a place of in-betweenness: private-public, individual-collective, telling-writing and ultimately real-imagined.

I argue that testimonio’s transsgressive desire turns testimonio itself into a site of struggles over memory (Jelin, 2004), and ask what imagination and creative writing can tell us of the changing practices of memory among people whose desire for testimonio as political acts takes place under a regime of state and societal repression. What possibilities were opened in such attempt? What problems did it produce? How is the activist-research balance sustained/played in the midst of fiction?

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Roy Huijsmans