Metonymy through motosidad : The Textual Recording of Andean Bilingualism and its Use for the Latin American Testimonial Narrative

This article offers an exploration of the textual recording of bilingualism, and the use of stylised language, for Latin American testimonial narratives. Testimonio is a form of writing through which subaltern subjects narrate lived experiences of marginalisation. These published stories begin as oral accounts, and therefore features of the subject’s dialect, sociolect or inter-language variety are often prominent in the final, textual version. In this article, the Quechua-influenced second-language form of Spanish known as castellano motoso is used as a framework through which Enrique Encinas’s published account of revolution and trade unionism in Jinapuni (1989) is analysed. Existing scholarship on castellano motoso is utilised to demonstrate the presence of the language form in Jinapuni’s text. Subsequently, the implication of the presence of this form of language in the narrative will be gauged; the article contends that the inclusion of elements of speech indicative of a politically charged form of language is a key to testimonio fulfilling its functions of poeticism and metonymy.