Camilla Townsend : “Sor Juana’s Nahuatl”
Camilla Townsend (Rutgers University)
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Miguel Cabrera, 1750, Instituto
Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico City (wikipedia)
In this piece, the author first explores scholars’ desire to envision Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz as a speaker of the indigenous language, Nahuatl, and then studies her actual use of Nahuatl. She finds that Sor Juana could by no means write in Nahuatl with the facility of a true speaker of the language. She was in fact Othering indigenous peoples when she appropriated words and phrases of the language as if they were her own and then used them erroneously. However, in this phenomenon she was a product of her age, and we can learn from her nonetheless.
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