A literary founding mother
The front of Mexico’s 100-peso banknote pays tribute to one of Latin America’s most important early female writers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), a prolific poet, playwright, philosopher, and nun, who wrote in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl. Known as a defender of enlightenment thinking and indigenous culture, Sor Juana (“Sister Juana”) is sometimes referred to as the “Founding Mother of Mexican literature” and considered “the most important poet and writer of New Spain’s literature,” according to the Bank of Mexico.
The bank’s director of currency issuance, Alejandro Alegre, says that Sor Juana is depicted as “a learned and determined woman, who fought against the conventions of her time that limited women’s access to culture and freedom of thought, in order to become the greatest figure of the Hispanic American letters of the 17th century.” She was previously featured on Mexico’s 200-peso note.
The banknote also depicts the arches of the colonial-era Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City’s historic center. The 18th century baroque building, a onetime Jesuit seminary and now a museum, was the birthplace of the country’s 20th century muralism movement. Artists including José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera painted some of their first murals on the building’s courtyard walls.
Mighty, mystical mariposas
Mexico’s 100-peso notes also pay tribute to a remarkable creature and one of the world’s most fascinating annual migrations. Every autumn in the forests of Michoacán and the State of Mexico, the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve—a protected UNESCO World Heritage site depicted on the back of the banknote—welcomes millions of the migratory orange-and-black monarch butterflies (mariposas monarcas), the ethereal, photogenic, and at-risk insects revered by climate scientists as a marker of climate health, and celebrated in music, poetry, and Mexican folklore as bringing good luck or even representing the souls of the dead. The Bank of Mexico’s Alegre notes that the monarch butterfly has “an important symbolism for Mexicans, as important spiritual and cultural values have been attributed to it.”
