Testimonialistas’ Self-Determination: Boricua Mothers and Colonial Schooling

This article highlights the Testimonios of Boricua (Puerto Rican) women in their twenties who were pregnant and parenting in their high school-age years and whose gender and familial self-determination and freedom were severely regulated by a suffocating network of colonial state institutions. At the center of this network was school. Mechanized to uphold gendered ideologies and materialities in the repressive campaign against Boricua women, US schooling was the site and the story of state intrusion into the self-determined life of Testimonialistas. Their Testimonios offer a narrative theorization of the ways in which Boricua women and mothers experienced and resisted the network of colonial schooling, and struggled toward self-determination for themselves, their children, and their communities.