Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz — Poet, Scholar, and Voice of Colonial Mexico

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born at San Miguel Nepantla, near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish navy captain from the Canary Islands and a criolla mother. Raised largely at her maternal grandfather's hacienda at Panoayan, she read from an early age in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, and was described by contemporaries as a child prodigy who asked to be sent to university in male disguise, a request refused because universities admitted only men.

Location: San Miguel Nepantla, New Spain

At about fifteen Juana entered the household of the vicereine, the wife of the Marquis de Mancera, in Mexico City. Her learning became a known attraction of the viceregal court of New Spain, where poetry, music, and intellectual display were part of court life and where her reputation as a scholar of unusual breadth began to take shape.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

Juana was publicly examined by about forty scholars on subjects including philosophy, theology, and science, an oral inquisition of her knowledge that she later described in her own account of her life. The examination made her reputation across the colony and demonstrated that a woman could match its trained theologians and academics.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

Juana entered the convent of the Order of Saint Jerome in Mexico City, taking the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A convent life offered one of the few paths open to a woman who wished to study and write rather than marry; her cell became a meeting place for the city's learned society, and she assembled a library of several thousand volumes alongside her scientific instruments.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

Sor Juana's comedia Los empeños de una casa ("Pawns of a House") was performed in Mexico City, among the most accomplished theatrical works of colonial Spanish America. In these years she was the leading literary figure of New Spain, writing lyric poetry, villancicos, and court verse in the elaborate culteranismo style of the Spanish Baroque.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

Sor Juana wrote a critique of a sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit preacher António Vieira on the love of Christ, the Carta Atenagórica. Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz of Puebla published the critique without her involvement under the pseudonym "Sor Filotea de la Cruz", appending a letter that praised her talent but admonished her to leave secular letters and devote herself to religion, in keeping with the Church's view that a nun's vocation excluded scholarly ambition.

Location: Puebla and Mexico City, New Spain

Sor Juana answered the bishop's pseudonymous letter with the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, dated 1 March 1691, a defense of women's right to study and of her own vocation as a writer. "I do not study in order to write, nor far less to teach", she wrote, "but simply to see whether by studying I may become less ignorant." The work, which marshals scriptural and classical authorities on behalf of women's learning, circulated in manuscript and became the most widely read text of Spanish American colonial literature.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

Sor Juana ceased to write and publish, selling or giving away her library of several thousand volumes and her collection of scientific instruments, and renewing her religious vows in 1694. Scholars continue to debate the cause, weighing the role of church pressure, of her own deepening religious devotion, and of the fragility of a woman's position in colonial society; her silence remains one of the contested episodes of Latin American literary history.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

Sor Juana died in Mexico City on 17 April 1695 after contracting illness during an epidemic that struck the city, and was buried in the Convent of San Jerónimo. She was forty-six years old and had written nothing for the last two years of her life.

Location: Mexico City, New Spain

The collection Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México was published in Madrid, bringing the Respuesta and her major philosophical poem Primero Sueño into print for the first time. The volume established her European reputation as "The Tenth Muse" and made the texts that church authorities had kept in manuscript part of the Spanish literary canon.

Location: Madrid, Spain

The Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz published Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or The Traps of Faith, a study that brought her work to a global modern readership and reframed her as a figure of intellectual freedom as well as literary achievement. She has since been taken up as a symbol of women's rights and of free inquiry, a candidate for Catholic sainthood has been advanced, and her face appears on Mexico's 100-peso banknote.