The LTLSRH project is a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) initiative working with the Latinx community at NEIU and the larger Chicagoland area to explore, narrate, record, and archive personal experiences of linguistic violence and resistance. Launched in Fall 2023, the project aims to promote structural change and radical transformation through narrative change, racial healing, and community building.

The LTLSRH archive was designed with three goals. 1) To build a collective memory of experiential and embodied knowledge about language and power. 2) To foster positive self-esteem, healing, and empowerment through the practice of sharing personal accounts of oppression and resistance to oppression. 3) To connect and build community through language decolonization.

Methodologically, the LTLSRH project engages with the Indigenous/Latin American usage of Testimonio (Smith 1999, Beverley 2004) and Pláticas in the Chicana/Latina feminist tradition (Torres 2022, Fierros Bernal 2016, Pérez Huber 2009). Both methodologies channel a decolonial approach to knowledge production, challenging dominant notions of valid and legitimate knowledge while supporting students of color as holders and creators of knowledge.

Each round of the LTLSRH project included five sessions of Pláticas, during which collaborators explored linguistic violence and resistance in their educational trajectories, after which they crafted their testimonios and videorecorded them for the archive.

The LTLSRH project was conceptualized and directed by Dr. Gabriela Veronelli, with support from the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and the department of World Languages and Cultures at NEIU.