"Sueño" is part of a series of works that Cecilia Vicuña began in the late 1960s, with which she sought to establish a dialogue with the aesthetics of popular art and peasant and indigenous pictorial traditions. Her paintings were aimed at constructing a different image of America, also manifesting her respect and affinity for those aesthetics considered subaltern from a bourgeois, colonial and patriarchal perspective. "Sueño" shows Pope Paul VI, dressed in his white cassock, surrounded by characters from various indigenous cultures of the Americas. The work was produced during the early period of Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile (1970-1973), whose presidential mandate was violently interrupted by Augusto Pinochet's military coup on September 11, 1973.