Collective Memory and the Right to Historical Presence

Sor Juana is celebrated today as a proto-feminist intellectual hero, but this recognition itself reflects privilege. How many women in her era had equivalent brilliance but left no trace? How many indigenous people, enslaved people, and the poor created knowledge that was never recorded? Sor Juana's survival in history depended on her having written, on her work being preserved in archives, and on later generations deciding her life mattered enough to study. This is a privilege—the privilege of historical presence, of being remembered, of having your ideas passed down. Acknowledging this means recognizing that history is selective. It preserves the thoughts and lives of the powerful while erasing the masses. Sor Juana's legacy is real and important, but it also represents a survival privilege. This concept asks: whose knowledge gets recorded? Whose stories survive? Whose contributions are forgotten? It suggests that acknowledging Sor Juana's privilege includes acknowledging the vastly larger number of people whose intellectual lives, suffering, and wisdom were never documented, and therefore seem to have never existed at all.