For senior Jocelyn Arcos, Spanish was never a question.

“It was actually always a plan,” Arcos said. “I’ve loved Spanish since high school, and my first semester [at Colgate], I was already enrolled in a literature course.” 

What wasn’t planned was her second major, Africana and Latin American studies — but by her senior year, Arcos had added a high honors thesis to her plate, written entirely in Spanish, on one of the most celebrated writers of the colonial Spanish-speaking world. 

Her thesis centers on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century nun of Spanish and Mexican heritage who is widely regarded as a pioneering feminist voice and sharp critic of the Catholic Church. Sor Juana wrote three major plays — two are traditionally classified as secular, and one as religious. Arcos’s argument cuts against that received wisdom.

“My thesis is essentially arguing that the two secular plays are actually not as secular as people think they are,” Arcos explained.

To make that case, Arcos closely read Sor Juana’s plays, repeatedly, and structured her analysis across three main chapters — one examining depictions of heaven, one tracing religious language and phrases throughout the texts and a third focused on love and marriage. The project is focused entirely on Sor Juana’s works rather than a comparative or contextual framework, which Arcos said allowed her to go deep.

“I kind of wanted to break that gap between what’s religious and what’s secular,” Arcos explained. 

The question of how to read Sor Juana through a theological lens is, Arcos argues, an underexplored one, which she finds somewhat ironic.

“A lot of people don’t look at it through a religious lens, which is surprising, because she’s a nun,” Arcos mused. 

Her own childhood growing up Catholic and a semester studying abroad in Madrid gave the project a personal dimension as well. Living with a traditional Catholic host mother in Spain — where the Catholic Church remains culturally central — helped her see the themes she was studying play out in real life.

Graduate school is the next plan. Arcos will pursue a master’s degree in Spanish literature at the University of Notre Dame, with an eye toward the literature of the Spanish Golden Age — the period of cultural flourishing from the early 16th century to the late 17th century that first drew her into the field, through a Colgate course that was decisive for her.

“That’s when I knew: I want to do Spanish, I want to go into literature,” Arcos said. 

Whether she continues to pursue a PhD and a professorship, or stops at the master’s level and lectures, Arcos knows that she wants to keep studying these themes in the future. She also credited the breadth and quality of Colgate’s Spanish course offerings for setting her on that path. 

“The courses here are just so diverse — sometimes you focus on Latin America, sometimes on authors only from Spain,” Arcos said. “They’re also just so passionate about their work. Every time that I went into class, they brought the excitement, like they wanted to talk about the books and the plays and everything. I think it just makes it that much easier, as a student, to feel excited about things as well.”

The high honors thesis itself — a year-long project taken across two semesters — has to clock in at a minimum of 75 pages, the high honors standard for Colgate’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Arcos worked with two advisors, Professor Juan Manuel Ramirez Velazquez and Professor Osvaldo Sandoval Leon, the latter of whom specializes in theater and proved especially helpful given that working with plays was new territory for her. 

“It’s a little hard sometimes to understand what’s going on, compared to a novel — so many characters to think about,” Arcos said.

Now that the thesis has been submitted, Arcos admitted to some fatigue. 

“I’ve reached a point where I’m a little like ‘ugh, I want a break from this,’” Arcos said.

But she was still clear-eyed about the purpose and passion that the process gave her.

“I still want to continue studying these themes, which is definitely something good that I got out of this,” she concluded. 

Her closing hope for readers — in Spanish, naturally — is that they take Sor Juana’s religious identity seriously as a lens, and that scholars continue pushing into the theological dimensions of her secular work. 

“There’s so much religion in her secular works,” Arcos marveled, “and I only studied two of her secular works. Imagine how much more there is to read.”