In Nobles de papel, Rocío Quispe-Agnoli presents a detailed and nuanced case study of the legal agency and self-fashioning of doña María Joaquina Inca, an indigenous woman who lived in colonial Mexico but claimed Inca noble birth by being the legitimate descendent of Túpac Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Cápac. Through a meticulous analysis of doña María Joaquina’s protracted eighteenth-century legal case (1788–1800) to be recognized as an Inca noblewoman and, therefore, win privileges associated with such a status, Quispe-Agnoli reveals the ways in which an elite native woman constructed and negotiated her identity or subjectivity on paper when confronting colonial power in the legal arena. In the words of the author, “what I offer here is a discursive and interdisciplinary examination . . . with the objective of reconstructing the textual ways in which the members of the Uchu Túpac Yupanqui family [especially María Joaquina] understood who they were...
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