Pratt"s essay opens in speaking about her son"s admiration for collecting and trading baseball cards. She emphasizes how her son"s entertaining and simple hobby gave him the opportunity to learn so many of life"s lessons. For example, trading the cards gave him a sense of fairness and trust. He learned about exchange and arithmetic, and patterns and order by arranging the cards.

             Following the anecdote about her son, Pratt introduces the reader to a discussion about Guaman Poma. Guaman Poma, an Adean, wrote a letter to King Philip III of Spain in1613 that was some twelve hundred pages long. This text contained information about Inca history, customs, laws, public offices, dynasties and their leaders. The letter by Poma is divided into two parts. The first part, "Nueva Coronica," "was the main writing apparatus through which the Spanish presented their American conquests to themselves" (Pratt 585). Mary Louise Pratt refers to Poma"s first part of the letter as an autoethnographic text. The basic purpose behind this type of text is to challenge a dominant belief system and the writers use the framework of the system to their advantage, using the language of the dominant civilization or the conqueror. Poma did that successfully, however his efforts to change the mind of King Philip III were useless, because the letter never reached him. The second part of the letter, "Bien gobierno y justicia," states that good government and justice can only be achieved through collaboration between the Inca and the Spanish.

             Guaman Poma"s text is created with the language of his invaders, the Spanish. It is important to point out that "he does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and adapts it along Andean lines to express Andean interests and aspirations" (Pratt 589). This process is called transculturation, where devices are pulled from the language or part of another person to get a point across.