Colonial Legacy and Contemporary Power

Sor Juana lived within Spanish colonial Mexico, and her intellectual work necessarily engaged colonial hierarchies—indigenous, African, Spanish identities were legally and socially stratified. Modern police systems in many nations similarly inherit colonial structures: laws designed to control colonized populations, enforcement patterns that target descendants of colonized peoples, institutional cultures built on dominance and extraction. In Mexico, the United States, Canada, Australia, and many other nations, policing structures were established or maintained to enforce colonial control. These historical roots shape current disparities: indigenous peoples experience higher police contact and harsher enforcement; immigration policing echoes colonial border control; urban policing concentrates in neighborhoods with histories of displacement. Sor Juana's intellectual tradition, rooted in recognizing colonial violence while imagining alternative futures, models how contemporary policing can engage its colonial legacy. This requires acknowledging historical harms, understanding how past injustices shape present disparities, and deliberately reconstructing police missions away from control toward service. Decolonized policing asks whether current practices serve community safety or reproduce colonial extraction and control. It requires recruiting from affected communities, centering indigenous and non-Western justice models, and fundamentally reimagining police purpose beyond law enforcement toward healing and community well-being.