Between the Archive and Memory: The "India Juliana" in Colonial Documentation and Her Cultural Representations in Paraguay

Abstract

This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the case of Juliana, a Guaraní woman who in 1541 chose to free herself from her condition as an enslaved woman by poisoning her Spanish enslaver, Nuño de Cabrera, in the city of Asunción. Drawing on the judicial proceedings preserved in the Archivo Nacional de Asunción and subsequent testimonies by Pero Hernández and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, we explore both the historical materiality of the case and its contemporary literary resignifications. The first part reconstructs the system of servitude and sexual violence directed at Indigenous women (1537–1550), contextualising Juliana's resistance within the transformation of the cuñadazgo into the system of rancheadas and generalised enslavement. Documentary analysis reveals that she was tried twice, initially released by Domingo Martínez de Irala, and publicly boasted to other Indigenous women of having killed her abuser, provoking her re-arrest and execution by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Juliana's public dissemination of the killing as an act of resistance constitutes extraordinary evidence of a profound anticolonial political consciousness and a pedagogy of resistance. The second part examines how Paraguayan literature (twentieth and twenty-first centuries) has rewritten Juliana, oscillating between narratives of colonial eroticisation and reclamations of her as a rebel leader. These representations reveal tensions in the construction of Paraguayan national identity and the place of Indigenous women in the collective imaginary. The dialogue between archive and memory invites reflection on the methodological and ethical responsibilities of writing the history of racialised individuals whose voices reach us through multiple layers of colonial mediation.