The Politics of Literacy and Education Access

Sor Juana's hunger for books—her famous library of thousands of volumes—was not merely personal curiosity but an act of political defiance in a society that restricted women's and indigenous peoples' access to formal learning. Literacy is never neutral: it determines who can read colonial records, challenge official narratives, create new knowledge, and preserve cultural memory. In decolonization processes, education becomes central because colonialism operates partly through controlling what people are allowed to know and how they learn. Access to reading, writing, and higher education in one's own languages and from one's own perspectives directly enables postcolonial identity formation. Sor Juana demonstrates that the pursuit of knowledge itself is a decolonial act—that those denied education must actively claim it, and that education systems reflecting colonial values must be fundamentally transformed to serve genuine decolonization rather than reproducing hierarchy.