This qualitative inquiry explores composite testimonios of acompañamiento assembled from multimodal life writing projects in an early-elementary bilingual literacy course within a larger bilingual teacher preparation program in central Texas. Border-crossing preservice teachers—many of whom are children of immigrants—engaged in bilingual and multimodal testimonio practices that helped them name, feel, and navigate emotional biliteracy tensions shaped by racist nativism and English-only ideologies. Grounded in Anzaldúa’s (Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality, Duke University Press, 2015) theorizing, Chicana Feminist testimonio epistemologies and methodologies (Delgado Bernal et al. in Equity Excellence Educ 45(3):363–372, 2012), and Sepúlveda’s (Harv Educ Rev 81(3):550–573, 2011) pedagogy of acompañamiento, authors cultivated arts-based pedagogical research spaces, through collaging, zine-making, and digital multimodality designed to foster protection, transformation, and reciprocity in bilingual teacher education. While testimonios center a storyteller’s individual truth, woven into broader narratives of injustice, we conceptualize testimonios of acompañamiento as relational processes in which truth is nurtured, held, and co-created through shared vulnerability, co-reflection, and mutual witnessing between preservice teachers and teacher educators. Meaning emerges through ongoing, ethically grounded relationship where educators and participants walk alongside one another over time, and share responsibility for the narrative’s impact. This methodology requires researchers to be present in the narrative-making process itself, blurring the lines between researcher, participant, and text. These relational testimonios amplified emotional biliteracy awareness, enabling preservice teachers to more fully understand how language, affect, and identity are shaped by white supremacist pressures on bilingualism and citizenship. A collective and composite voice, represented as Max, synthesizes shared perspectives—including our own as children of immigrants—to illustrate how acompañamiento disrupts hierarchical teacher–student research relationships and instead centers solidarity, care, and justice.
Valdez et al. (Sat,) studied this question.