Racial identity — lived experience

Race is a social invention with material consequences so severe that it functions, in practice, as one of the most determining facts of a life. To have a racial identity is to be inserted into a system of meanings that preceded your birth and will outlast your death, regardless of whether you chose to enter it. The examined racial identity does not pretend the system away but asks how to inhabit it with dignity and resist what is unjust — the project Juana knew intimately, navigating the caste hierarchies of colonial New Spain.