Spanish-Aztec War (1519-21):
- Main players are well known – Hernan Cortes and Montezuma
- Lesser known is a brilliant and multilingual exiled Aztec woman who was enslaved, then served as a guide and interpreter, then became Cortes’s mistress
- This woman was known as Dona Marina, Malintzin, but was more widely known as La Malinche
Her early life:
- Born Malinal, the daughter of an Aztec cacique (chief) which gave her an usual level of education which she would later leverage as a guide and interpreter for the Spanish
- After her father’s death, her mother sold her to slavers and staged a funeral to explain her daughter’s sudden disappearance
- According to Candelaria, the traders eventually sold Malinal to a cacique in Tabasco, where she lived until Cortes arrived in 1519
- The cacique presented Cortes with a group of young women to serve him, including Malinal and she quickly distinguished herself
- The Spanish gave her the respectful name “Dona Marina” while the Aztecs attached an honorary addendum of -tzin to her name, making her Malintzin
Power and Legacy:
- Malintzin became indispensable as a translator as she was capable of functionally translating from one language to the other, but of speaking compellingly, strategizing and forging political connections
- Candelaria cites 2 moments when La Malinche directly saved the Spanish conquistadors from destruction – once in Tlaxcala “her astute observations led her to uncover an indigenous conspiracy against Cortes” and another time she befriended an old women who led her to crucial information about a dangerous impending attack from Montezuma
Controversy – was history too harsh on her?
- Even though she was integral to Spain’s success, La Malinche has historically been a controversial figure, with T.R. Fehrenbach saying “If there is one villainess in Mexican history, she is Malintzin. She was to become the ethnic traitress supreme”
- However, Candelaria argues that history has been unduly harsh on La Malinche, and haven’t considered the context of the time
- Even her role as Cortes’s mistress, for which she has been much maligned, is complex – there is no indication that their relationship involved love or even enthusiasm
- La Malinche may not have been immune to the air of mysticism surrounding the Spanish – Candelaria points out that if Montezuma himself wasn’t sure of their mortality or immortality, then “surely La Malinche experienced the same uncertainty. She may have seen herself as a divinely selected participant in a most fateful destiny.”
- Candelaria points out that La Malinche’s act of turning on her back on her own people makes more psychological sense when we consider that, at a young age, she had been sold by her own mother into slavery
Conclusion:
- La Malinche left no records of her own life
- What we know depends entirely on secondhand accounts, or historians’ interpretations
- However these accounts have revealed that she was a particularly intelligent and resourceful woman, who was betrayed, enslaved, buffeted between two empires but somehow emerged as a historical giant in her own right