The Archive as Contested Terrain

What we know of Sor Juana comes through texts produced within colonial structures—her poetry, letters, and the Response were written in Spanish, published by colonial institutions, and preserved by ecclesiastical authorities. Yet these documents contain evidence of her resistance, her intellectual autonomy, and her engagement with Mexican realities. Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship emphasizes that archives are not neutral repositories of truth but products of power; colonizers documented what mattered to them, erased what threatened them, and interpreted evidence through colonial lenses. Decolonization requires reading existing archives against the grain, recovering silenced voices, and creating new archives—oral histories, community narratives, indigenous records—that reflect how colonized peoples understood and recorded their own experience. Sor Juana's work models this practice: her poems and arguments survive in colonial records, yet they articulate resistant knowledge. For postcolonial identity, understanding the archive as contested terrain means developing critical literacy about how history is preserved and told, actively recovering suppressed accounts, and authorizing new forms of historical documentation and interpretation rooted in colonized communities' own frameworks.