Linguistic Identity and Colonial Naming

Sor Juana wrote in Spanish, the language of her colonizer, yet she used it to assert her Mexican criolla identity and indigenous heritage. This linguistic paradox reveals that names and languages are sites of both domination and creative resistance. Colonial naming practices impose foreign languages, religions, and identities while suppressing native ones. Yet individuals and communities reclaim agency by inflecting dominant languages with their own meanings, histories, and identities. Across cultures, bilingual and multilingual people navigate this tension daily—their names may sound foreign in one context, familiar in another. Sor Juana demonstrates how intellectual work in a colonizer's language need not mean acceptance of colonial identity; instead, it becomes a space where indigenous and colonial identities negotiate, blend, and assert counter-narratives. Language becomes a tool for claiming rather than erasing identity.