Does the Term “Subaltern” Apply to Colonial California?: “Testimonios” in Context

Both Testimonios and Californio Voices describe their documents as “testimonios,” written accounts of the older, non-American inhabitants of California whose stories were recorded by outsiders for the purpose of writing an American history of the state. Both works refer frequently to the scholarship of Rosaura Sánchez articulated in her Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (1995) to position their documents in the discourse between the downtrodden and the exploiter. Testimonios explicitly invokes Sánchez’s claim that these are, however mediated, the voices of the “subaltern” (p. xxii). Both of these reviewed works are based on primary documents and provide rich insights not available through the American histories that have used most of these accounts selectively as sources. But do these testimonios represent the voice of the subaltern and is that term relevant in this instance? Attempting to answer these two questions before evaluating the works should facilitate better appreciation of both Testimonios and of Californio Voices.

Sánchez begins her discussion of Californio testimonios by asserting that they “represent an effort on the part of this subaltern population to counter hegemonic historiography, to construct a collective identity, and to reposition and recenter themselves textually at a time when the physical and social spaces from which they could operate had become increasingly circumscribed” (p. x). Sánchez refers to the dramatically changed position of Californios, those Spanish-speaking non-Indian people of the colony of Spain and Mexico, who lost power, land, and position because of the American conquest. Sánchez describes the subaltern nature of the Californios as conquered, dispossessed men and women made social exiles within their homeland, while largely sidestepping their control of those originally living on that land, the Indians. Sánchez invokes two ideas from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci—subaltern and hegemony—that demand closer scrutiny (p. 13).

The terms come from Gramsci’s notebooks written while imprisoned by the Fascists for his Marxist writings and subaltern was a codeword for proletariat—those who cannot speak under capitalist modes of production—to get his writings past the prison censors and into the hands of his publishers and readers. This idea has been taken by postcolonialists and enlarged—some would say changed to a euphemism for peasantry and any marginalized group including women—and has given rise to the journal Subaltern Studies and to the identically named research field.¹ Those engaging in writing about subaltern studies have used the British colonial system in South Asia as their departure point and have been joined by those studying Spanish colonialism in Latin America and its successor in exploitation and oppression, United States imperialism to expand the field of inquiry into the Americas.

Testimonios have a long history in Latin America but they have only recently been recognized as a site for the contestation of power by those oppressed. As such they constitute a voice of opposition from the exploited against their exploiters. Testimonios, as Sánchez argues are partly autobiography, partly a form of collective memory, and an attempt at writing identity by telling a view contrary to the hegemonic view of the master group or class (pp. 6–14). Hegemony is the dominant narrative of the elite classes that provides a worldview by which subordination of the weak is explained and justified.

In Latin America for the past twenty-five years the uhr text of testimonio has been I Rigoberta Menchú.² This testimonio, the purported autobiography of the author, claims as well to be...