sor juana inés de la cruz
17th century mexican nun, poet, and philosopher, the earliest feminist philosopher of the americas. her respuesta a sor filotea (1691) is a defense of the right to intellectual life, written under severe institutional constraint: from within a convent, navigating ecclesiastical censorship, producing knowledge from a position of enforced limitation.
her relationship to the conditions of making under constraint resonates with zine as epistemology and conviviality: the act of thinking and writing despite the system designed to prevent it. making as resistance, centuries before the term existed.
a historical lineage anchor and a geographic one. she wrote from mexico city, where i also spend significant time.