Postcolonial identity and decolonization

Colonialism did not only take land and labor; it installed a system of meanings that told colonized people who they were — and that system did not end when the flags were lowered. Decolonization as identity work means auditing what was imposed: language, religion, beauty standards, knowledge systems, the very frameworks through which one understands the self. Juana lived inside this architecture, writing in the colonizer's language with a mind shaped by both worlds, and her complexity is a record of what that costs and what it makes possible.