La Malinche
La Malinche
MALINCHE’S CULTURAL AND DISCURSIVE SIGNIFICANCE
Easily the most elusive, eminent figure in the history of the Americas, Doña Marina, “La Malinche,” defies basic biographical description. Indeed, very little is known about her, and nothing really of the date and place of her birth, the cause or place of her death, or even her very name. Some call her Malintzin Tenepal, based on deductive speculation pertaining to the birth sign Malinalli (twisted grass) found in the tonalámatl (the Aztec book of horoscopes) and the root word tene (sharp; cutting), which reflects a facility for language evident in Marina’s later life (she could speak Nahuatl, Chontal Maya, the tongues of Potonchan, and eventually Spanish). This gift for speech secured her role as the translator on the Spanish expedition to, and conquest of, Tenochtitlan.
THE HISTORY OF LA MALINCHE
Doña Marina came to the attention of the Spaniards in March 1519, following the battle of Cintla, when the defeated Tabascans gave her and nineteen other women to the Spaniards as a token of friendship and alliance. The Spanish friar Bartólome de Olmedo baptized her “Marina” and later instructed her in the Catholic faith. As a Catholic convert and loyal campaigner, Marina held a pre-eminent role among the female conquistadoras of the European forces and their native allies. Both the Spaniards and Indians considered her important and indispensable to the colonial project. The Spaniards, for example, were overjoyed to learn that she had survived the debacle of La Noche Triste the evening of June 30, 1520, when they fled from Tenochtitlan losing hundreds of lives and large quantities of treasure. A native account of the conquest, El Lienzo de Tlaxcala, depicts Marina as larger in scale than all others, and as the recipient of greater amounts of gold tribute than that given Cortés. Her name, too, marked those closely associated with her. Juan Pérez de Arteaga, her guard, became “Juan Pérez Malinche” and Cortés himself was known as “el Malinche” among the natives. By the end of the conquest, in 1521, Marina’s service and elevated status brought her considerable wealth and recognition.
Marina had settled in Coyoacán, just outside Mexico City, when she joined Cortés on his 1524 expedition to Las Hibueras (Honduras) in wasteful pursuit of the renegade Cristóbal de Olid. On route, she wed Captain Juan Jaramillo in Tiltepec on the encomienda (estate) of the conquistador Alonso de Ojeda; as a dowry she received the encomiendas of Olutla and Xaltipan in the Coatzacoalcos region, allowing her the tribute and labor of the people of these towns. On the return trip, in 1526, Marina gave birth to a girl, her second child by a Spaniard. The first was Martín Cortés (Cortés’s son)—known as “el grande,” for his Spanish half-brother was given the same name.
Two years later, in 1528, Cortes departed for Spain with his mestizo son, but not with the boy’s mother. Nothing more is known about Marina and some authors speculate that she died that year, possibly of smallpox. Mention of her in the historical records surfaces on May 16, 1542, when Maria Jaramillo (Marina’s daughter) sued her father (who tried to disinherit her) for the valued encomienda of Xilotepec. Maria was granted half the encomienda, in part due to her mother’s distinguished achievements.
MALINCHE’S CULTURAL AND DISCURSIVE SIGNIFICANCE
In his book, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, an eyewitness account of the conquest, conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, presents the first historical account of Marina. Mimicking the immensely popular chivalric literature of the time, as well as aspects of Joseph’s biblical story of redemption and forgiveness, his tale transforms Marina into a heroine. Borrowing stylistic traits from Spanish medieval narrative, Díaz del Castillo presents Marina as an heir of Aztec aristocracy and refers to her by using the honorific prefix doña. As a child, he says, Marina was robbed of her birthright when her mother gave her away to be raised as a Mayan slave. Despite this betrayal, Marina forgave all and exalted her newfound Christian faith and Hispanic culture. She is thus presented as the good and virtuous “Angel of the Expedition.”
By the nineteenth century, Mexican patriots had revised this image. Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 forged a national identity largely antipathetic to Spain and those associated with its legacy; Marina was subsequently cast as a traitor and whore. Not surprisingly, Mexico’s first historical novel, Xicotencatl (1826), faults her for the Spanish defeat of indigenous Mexico and as the root of all that had gone wrong in the new republican nation. Two decades later, as his country fought to keep its land and sovereignty during the Mexican American War of 1846–1848, the dynamic orator Ignacio Ramirez incited nationalist sentiment by evoking the image of La Malinche as Cortés’s mistress and identifying her complicity with foreigners as the cause of the fall of ancient Mexico. It was not until the last quarter of the twentieth century that Mexican feminists such as Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro challenged the patriarchal discourse concerning La Malinche.
By 1973, Chicana feminists were challenging patriarchal authority through the appropriation and revision of Malinche’s image. The mere mention of her in a poem by Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, who laments “Pinche, como duele ser Malinche” (‘Damn, how it hurts to be Malinche’), initiated a collective process by Chicanas of remembering Malinche piece by interpretive piece in narrative and literary form in order to contest a politics of sexism and historical erasure. To Norma Alarcón, Malinche is a “paradigmatic figure in Chicana feminism,” for Chicana feminist discourse began with her and continues to be preoccupied with her signification. In 1974, frustrated by the dearth of information on Malinche, Adelaida R. Del Castillo offered a social scientific discourse of Malinche’s life and role in the conquest as if historical authenticity were possible. For the poet and author Cherrie Moraga, Malinche bequeathed Chicanas a sexual legacy, which in its most radical form (lesbianism) represents the ultimate control of female sexual identity. To this day, Chicana discourse on the Malinche paradigm contests sexism, cultural nationalism, heteronormative sexuality, and patriarchal hegemony.
SEE ALSO Chicana Feminism; El Mestizaje.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alarcón, Norma. 1989. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” Cultural Critique 13: 57–87.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Del Castillo, Adelaida R. 1977. “Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective.” In Essays on La Mujer, edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martinez Cruz. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center Publications, University of California.
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1996. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Edited by Genaro García. Translated by A.P. Maudslay. New York: Da Capo Press.
Messinger Cypess, Sandra. 1991. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Adelaida R. Del Castillo