Intersectionality as Inheritance and Future

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was not named 'intersectionality' as such, yet she lived and wrote from multiply-positioned consciousness: analyzing how gender, race, colonialism, religion, and class shaped knowledge, rights, and possibility. By recognizing her as intellectual ancestor to intersectional practice, we claim lineage reaching beyond contemporary theory into history. This concept invites practitioners to find and name intersectional wisdom in unexpected places: in letters, rebellions, survival strategies, and creative work. It also requires accountability—intersectionality is not a new invention gifted by theorists, but an analysis emerging from the lived experience of those at multiple margins. Sor Juana's complexity—her contradictions, her strategies, her refusals—becomes a mirror for contemporary intersectional practice. This lineage work honors those whose names we may never know, while insisting that we know intersectionality not as abstract theory but as embodied wisdom inherited and renewed.