Refuge in Language and Culture

Sor Juana wrote in Spanish, engaged with Latin and indigenous knowledge, and used language as a space of intellectual freedom and cultural assertion. For refugees and immigrants, maintaining language, cultural practice, and spiritual tradition is simultaneously intimate sustenance and political act. Forced assimilation demands linguistic erasure—children forbidden to speak parents' languages, cultural practices shamed as backwards, spiritual traditions displaced by dominant ones. Justice requires protecting linguistic rights, supporting multilingualism, and valuing cultural and spiritual diversity. This means practical commitments: interpretation services in all languages, education in heritage languages, cultural space and resources in refugee resettlement, protection for indigenous and minority cultural practices. It also means ideological work: challenging the notion that 'integration' requires cultural erasure, recognizing that multilingual people are enriched not burdened, celebrating cultural diversity. Sor Juana's legacy shows that language and culture are not obstacles to justice but essential expressions of human dignity and freedom. Building refuge in language and culture—maintaining it, celebrating it, resisting its erasure—becomes a practice that sustains displaced persons through displacement and asserts their right to exist fully as themselves.