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Indigenous Andean Women In Colonial Textual Discourses, Sara Guengerich

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This dissertation combines historical and literary analysis to challenge a history of literary studies that reads colonial texts as reflecting a real historical domination of indigenous Andean women in a patriarchal society. Through a comparative examination of colonial chronicles and archival documents, I reconsider the portrayal of these women as having played the role of victims from the very beginning of colonial relations through the seventeenth century. Through these sources, I unveil these womens discursive agency that was expressed in archival documents, only to be suppressed in colonial chronicles and contemporary literary criticism.