The Politics of Language and Authority

Sor Juana's polyglot brilliance—her command of Latin, Spanish, indigenous languages, theology, and philosophy—gave her authority that her gender alone would have denied. Language was her tool for claiming space in intellectual discourse. For immigrants, language operates similarly: accent, fluency, and linguistic mastery become markers through which systems evaluate legitimacy and capacity. This concept examines how immigrants' linguistic complexity—code-switching, bilingualism, accent—gets pathologized or erased rather than recognized as intellectual sophistication. The Sophos tradition shows that true justice requires valuing multilingual knowledge and rejecting standards that privilege native-speaker monolingualism. It means recognizing that immigrants' creative language practices are not deficiencies but evidence of intellectual flexibility. Moreover, it addresses how access to language education, literacy resources, and spaces to develop linguistic authority are matters of justice. Immigrants who master dominant language systems while maintaining heritage languages claim authority over their own narratives and resist being reduced to 'non-English speakers' or 'foreigners.'