Philosophical Letter Writing: A Look at Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Reply” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Speaking in Tongues”

scholars often use letter correspondences to uncover missing historical information. For example, while searching for the influential but unacknowledged women in the history of pragmatism, Charlene Haddock Seigfried discovered John Dewey’s letters to Elsie Ripley Clapp. Using these letters, Seigfried defended Clapp’s name as an early pragmatist (Seigfried 50). Similarly, Joan Smith cited Dewey’s letter to John T. McManis to show that Ella Flagg Young likewise influenced Dewey’s work (Smith 152). More recently, Eduardo Mendieta has defended a different approach to letters, and argues that we should take the letters, diaries, and notebooks of certain philosophers more seriously—not just for the historical or philosophical content they may provide, but also so that we might better familiarize ourselves with the philosophers we study. According to Mendieta, these alternatively written works can offer us a more nuanced picture of a certain philosopher’s “philosophical persona” (Mendieta 421). My essay adds another consideration of letters and philosophy, by asking what the letter format can specifically tell us about the pursuit of certain philosophical questions, particularly letters written by women of color feminists who investigate questions born from oppression and exclusion.

My main interlocutors will be Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and her letter “Reply to Sor Philothea”; and Gloria Anzaldúa, with her letter “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” Both of these philosophers are well-read figures in Latina feminist scholarship, and both of their letters responded to at least one ever-present question for Inter-American Latina philosophers: “[F]or us, what would it mean to be fully seen, heard, and acknowledged as subjects with agency?” This question underlies Latinas’ fight against colonization, the renouncement of patriarchal structures, and generations of not having a voice in many public, intellectual, and academic spaces (Yugar xv). Although both Sor Juana’s and Anzaldúa’s letters are inseparable from their historical context, I find significance in the fact that both of these pieces were written as letters. After a brief discussion on how these letters respond to the question of agency, in my third section, I argue that Sor Juana’s and Anzaldúa’s decisions to write these texts as letters may serve a performative function in that they attempt to establish the intimacy and immediacy that may be necessary for discussing certain questions born from oppression and exclusion.

Sor Juana’s “Reply” and The Pursuit of Women’s Agency

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) is slowly making a comeback. In her lifetime, she was an acclaimed author and a recognized genius of seventeenth-century Mexico and Spain.¹ Following her death, however, the Church burned several of her writings, which led to her being forgotten for about two hundred years (Yugar 15). Fortunately, in 1952, Alfonso Méndez Plan-carte compiled a collection of her remaining works, The Complete Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, which helped jump-start her re-recognition. Furthermore, Octavio Paz’s 1988 biography of her life, Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith, has played a significant role in her contemporary re-popularization. Presently, Sor Juana is becoming more readily regarded as the “First Feminist of America,” and her work is becoming of greater interest for Latino/a literature scholars, Latin American studies scholars, and a growing number of philosophers (Merrim 11).

Most of what we know about Sor Juana’s life comes from her letter “Reply to Sor Philothea” (Trueblood). Her letter tells us that by the age of three, she had already taught herself how to read, and that when she was young, she begged her mother to let her attend university, even if it meant dressing as a man every day. Her mother refused to allow this, and as a young woman of seventeenth-century New Spain, Sor Juana faced two options: join a convent or marry a man. When the time came to decide, Sor Juana took her vows as a nun, since it was the...