The Archive and the Recovery of Silenced Voices

Sor Juana's works survived incomplete, scattered, censored, and often misrepresented—yet recovering her writings has been central to decolonial scholarship. Archives are sites of power: what is preserved, catalogued, and made available shapes what counts as history. Colonial archives often erase indigenous knowledges, women's contributions, and subaltern perspectives. The work of recovering Sor Juana—translating her texts, tracing her influences, contextualizing her brilliance—is decolonial archival practice. Postcolonial scholars engage in deliberate recovery projects: seeking oral histories, indigenous manuscripts, women's writings, and working-class records suppressed by colonial documentation practices. Decolonization requires building alternative archives that center previously silenced voices and create new narratives of intellectual history. This means recognizing that canonical Western knowledge excludes countless brilliant thinkers from colonized regions. Sor Juana's recovery demonstrates that decolonization includes historiographical work: rewriting who we recognize as intellectual authorities and reclaiming erased genealogies of thought.