Colonial Legacy and Carceral Continuity

Sor Juana lived within colonial Spanish America, a system of race-based domination that criminalized indigenous and African populations to maintain hierarchy. Modern mass incarceration in the United States continues this colonial project through different mechanisms: prisons concentrate incarcerated populations that are disproportionately Black and Indigenous, echoing colonial racial categorization and control. This concept examines mass incarceration not as a departure from but as a continuation of settler-colonial governance. The 13th Amendment's slavery exception, the convict leasing system, Jim Crow enforcement, and contemporary mass incarceration form an unbroken chain of racialized control. Sor Juana's position at the intersection of colonial knowledge and critique enables understanding how incarceration serves the same function colonialism did: defining certain populations as naturally suited to domination, extracting their labor, and justifying subjugation through alleged inferiority. Recognizing this genealogy reveals that ending mass incarceration requires dismantling the colonial structures it perpetuates.