The examined colonial subject is the person who has been assigned a position in someone else's imperial story and refuses to accept that position as the full account of who they are. Frantz Fanon described the psychological work of colonialism — the installation of the colonizer's gaze as the lens through which the colonized sees themselves — and decolonization as, first, the recovery of the capacity to see otherwise. Juana was a creole woman in New Spain, formed by multiple colonial inheritances and subordinated by several simultaneously; her voice, which could not be fully contained by any of them, is a record of what the examined colonial subject can do with a room of their own.
Juana