Legacy as Living Practice Rather Than Monument

Sor Juana's significance lies not in turning her into a timeless icon but in how her example and writing remain actively useful for contemporary struggles. Her questions about women's education, intellectual authority, institutional control, and survival remain urgent. This concept rejects the notion that we honor historical figures through preservation or respectful distance. Instead, it invites living engagement: reading their work with contemporary questions, learning from their strategies and failures, adapting their insights to new contexts. For intersectional practice, this means treating Sor Juana and other marginalized thinkers as collaborators and guides rather than relics. It means asking what her resistance teaches about our own, how her questions illuminate current power dynamics, and what her silencing reveals about contemporary silencing. It means citing and crediting her work not as historical documentation but as ongoing intellectual contribution. Legacy becomes a practice of continuous reinterpretation and application, keeping the deceased alive as teachers and ancestors in actual movement work.