Language and identity — what your first language holds

The first language is not simply a system of communication but the medium in which the self first formed — the conceptual structure within which early experience was organized, the set of sounds that holds the particular grief and love and humor of a specific world. To lose access to a first language — through immigration, colonization, or enforced assimilation — is to lose something that cannot be fully recovered in translation: the self that exists only in that register. Juana wrote in Spanish and Latin while the Indigenous peoples around her were being forced from their own tongues, and she understood the violence involved.