Testimonio includes a diverse corpus of literature prompted by
periods of intense social and political upheaval throughout
Latin America, including the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Bay of
Pigs/ Invasión de Girón (1961), the Sandinista Revolution in
Nicaragua (1979), Indigenous human rights struggles in Guatemala
and the military dictatorships that dominated the Southern cone
in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Yudice 20). While the impulse
to write testimonio has been triggered by an array of
circumstances, most of the works share the following
characteristics: - They are based on traumatic historical and/or
social episode(s). - They are told from an individual
perspective. - The individual experience serves as an allegory
for the communal experience as a whole. - The author has been
oppressed or silenced in some capacity and the work contains
political statement against the perceived oppressor or suffering
caused by that oppression. - Literary elements such as dialogue,
poetry and metaphors are infused throug