Intergenerational Knowledge Transmission Across Rupture

Sor Juana's intellectual life was built on a foundation ruptured by colonization: she was educated in European traditions while inhabiting a colonized body in the Americas. Her lineage was fragmented, her intellectual inheritance incomplete. Yet she created knowledge anyway, built on recovered fragments and self-teaching. Contemporary intersectional work faces similar ruptures: the deliberate erasure of indigenous knowledge systems, the disruption of Black intellectual traditions through slavery and ongoing violence, the suppression of queer and gender-nonconforming knowledge keepers. Sor Juana teaches that we can create intellectual lineages across rupture, honoring what we've inherited while being honest about what's been stolen. This concept asks practitioners to trace their own broken lineages, to recover what we can, to honor knowledge-keepers past and present, and to build intentional communities of intellectual transmission. Justice-oriented intersectional work includes this archival labor—recovering, remembering, and transmitting knowledge despite systems designed to erase it.