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To be sure, every historical account is a construct,
but a construct arising from a dialog between the
historian and the past, one that does not occur in a
vacuum but within a community of inquiring minds
who share criteria of plausibility. (Iggers, 1997, p. 145)
Archival documents chronicling legal procedures during colonial times are considered one of the best sources for understanding the great complexity and conflicts that played out in the daily lives of indigenous peoples, especially in their interactions with colonial authorities throughout the Americas (Stern, 1992; Stavig, 1999). There is a temptation to assume that these procedures were chronicled without any bias, that they are in a way 'windows on people's lives', ignoring the fact that they are indeed 'constructed texts' (Mallon, 1994, p. 1506). One document that challenges the model of archive-as-truth is the 'confession' of Micaela Bastidas, wife of the rebel Túpac Amaru II and a rebel leader in her own right (CDIP, 1971a).
The possibility that her confession reveals hidden polemics responding to specifically Spanish social discourses allows us to analyse other complex issues around, for example, ethnicity, gender and social status in the colonial era. It is clear that the 'voices of the past' like that of Micaela Bastidas speak to us through documents that are shaped by discursive concerns. Her 'confession' is a document constructed through Spanish authority, witnesses and the Spanish scribe who recorded--and interpreted--the exchange through his own cultural lenses. These documentary sources are then also, as Iggers (1997, p. 122) indicates, 'linguistic constructs, texts, which use rhetorical strategies to make a point unless they are pure data'.
Given the mediated nature of Micaela's 'confession', is it then possible to begin to understand who Bastidas was in reality? How can we read her? Is she playing the woman she thinks Spaniards expect her to be as a mestiza of indigenous descent or ladina (an acculturated indigenous individual)? Is she the 'monstrous' woman witnesses describe? Were Micaela's Spanish legal defenders portraying her correctly as, after all, just a submissive and battered wife who did not deserve to die? (CDIP, 1971a). Or was she trying to convince her captors that she was no longer the product of Andean culture but an assimilated colonial subject doubly...