Testimonios and the Yearning to be Understood in Anti-DEI Climates

The Vermont Connection Volume 46 Coalition and Insurgence: Responding to the Anti-DEI Climate in Higher Education. Article 8 April 2025 Testimonios and the Yearning to be Understood in Anti-DEI Climates Janel Acosta Florida State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc Part of the Higher Education Commons Recommended Citation Acosta, J. (2025). Testimonios and the Yearning to be Understood in Anti-DEI Climates. The Vermont Connection, 46(1). https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc/vol46/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Education and Social Services at UVM ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Vermont Connection by an authorized editor of UVM ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact . Testimonios and the Yearning to be Understood in Anti-DEI Climates Cover Page Footnote The author would like to thank the six participants of their study. This article is available in The Vermont Connection: https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc/vol46/iss1/8 32 • The Vermont Connection • 2025 • Volume 46 Testimonios and the Yearning to be Understood in Anti-DEI Climates Janel Acosta This reflection discusses my dissertation work, which sought to understand how White-presenting Latina students made sense of their racial identity. Despite living and learning in a state that is implementing anti-DEI policies, I was able to conduct research that honored the lived experiences and stories of my participants, who expressed never feeling as if they belonged in any space due to not "looking Latina." This reflection offers personal testimony and relevant research literature on utilizing testimonios and offers testimonios as a tool to cultivate community with students of color during these times. Keywords: Qualitative research, Latina students, Testimonios, DEI Janel Acosta, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences at Florida State University. Her research focuses on Latine college students’ racial identity development, specifically looking at how colorism and perceptions of Whiteness manifest in the Latine community. Through her work, Janel hopes to contribute to contribute to anti-racist research so that all students feel a sense of belonging in college. In her free time, Janel enjoys running, watching baseball, and reading fiction novels with a hot cup of coffee. 33 • The Vermont Connection • 2025 • Volume 46 Testimonios and the Yearning to be Understood in Anti-DEI Climates In Nava’s (1997) film Selena, there is a scene where Selena is having a conversation with her dad and brother about their Mexican-American identity. In the scene, her dad passionately proclaims, “Being Mexican-American is tough… we gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans, and more Americans than the Americans; both at the same time! It’s exhausting! Man, nobody knows how tough it is to be Mexican-American.” Growing up a massive Selena Quintanilla fan, I, along with many other Tejanos, felt (and continue to feel) a solid affinity for the late singer, who tragically passed away one year before I was born. As a Mexican-American, the movie Selena was more than just a film about a promising young star; it represented who I was and how I felt. Selena’s story resonated profoundly with me because I saw someone who looked like me speak on a struggle I always felt: never feeling enough. This belief of not feeling Mexican enough or Latina enough inspired my dissertation, titled “How White-Presenting Latina Students Make Sense of and Experience Their Racial Identity.” My dissertation found that despite having racial privilege, White-presenting Latinas still felt othered by their community for not fitting into the status quo of what a Latina is “supposed” to look like (Acosta, 2024). I viewed this study as a springboard to future research on race, specifically on how Whiteness is experiences in the Latin American community by those who are perceived as White (Acosta, 2024). In the meantime, however, I feel compelled to share what I learned about conducting qualitative research on racial identity, especially when anti- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts are being implemented throughout higher education institutions. This personal narrative will reflect on my dissertation work and discuss how the qualitative methodology I employed, testimonios, can serve as a tool and a practice when engaging in identity-related work in anti-DEI spaces. The Power of Bearing Witness and Sharing Your Story Inspired by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), who wrote about life in the borderlands, both physically and metaphorically, I wanted my work to illuminate the nuances of discussing something as complex as our identity. For example, I wanted to understand how holding multiple, often conflicting identities can make you feel like you were “ni de aqui, ni de alla” (neither from here nor there). My dissertation aimed to uncover how colorism and a preference for Whiteness manifested in the lives of my six participants, who acknowledged they were perceived as White rather than Latina (Acosta, 2024). Working with Erikson’s (1994) insights of identity, and how adolescence is a central time in which we begin to form our identities, my research questions focused on the messages Latina students received regarding their White-presenting identity from their families as young children, and from their peers as young adults. I utilized testimonios as my leading method to honor the Latin American culture of oral history and storytelling. In research, testimonios are used to gain knowledge from those in the margins (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). The Latina Feminist Group (2001) provided me with a strong foundation for situating testimonios to create knowledge through these lived experiences. They define testimonios 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). I had the privilege of bearing witness to my six participants’ testimonios and retelling their stories so that we can 34 • The Vermont Connection • 2025 • Volume 46 further understand how perceptions of Whiteness can affect how Latinas are racialized within the context of the United States (Holguín Mendoza et al., 2021; Rodríguez, 2000). While I fully expected my participants to feel a range of emotions when speaking about something as personal as their identity, I did not expect how listening to their testimonios would make me feel. The testimonios emerged from two semi-structured interviews or pláticas with each participant. They were conducted at a large public institution in the Southern United States both in-person and via Zoom. What makes pláticas unique from a more traditional interview style is that it requires a certain level of relat (...truncated)