She stumbled on the rocky path as they emerged from the forest, lashing out in anger and resentment at the one who had grabbed her shoulder prodding her along. She needed no prodding. She had been through all this before.
It had been more than ten years since she was first torn from her mother’s arms by the Mexica slave traders, bent face down into a canoe, and forced to endure countless days as they moved swiftly south along the coast. It was no more than the following rainy season before she was traded again for a few baskets of corn, a few blocks of salt. But this was different.
The men who waited below were not like the dark-skinned men who surrounded her now keeping her and the 19 others tightly clustered together in case someone tried to run. The bearded men standing on the beach below wore iron like she had never seen before. These men had no feathers in their hair, instead they wore iron hats, curved and pointed at the front like the beak of a crested caracara. They wore metal plates strapped to their chest that glinted in the sun, and long metal swords, curved like water poured from a gourd, hung at their sides. These were brutal men who had ruthlessly cut down more than 200 of their best warriors in a matter of hours. Never in legend or in stone had so many died in a single day. Now she was to be given to these men, her life exchanged for peace.
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In the year 1500, nineteen years before the Spanish arrived in Mexico, a daughter was born to a family in the Yucatan where both the Maya and Aztec empires vied for supremacy. Legends tell us that her parents named her Malinalli, after the goddess of grass, although no one really knows her true name. It is thought by some that she may have been of noble birth due to her apparent understanding of the courtly language of the ruling elite. When she was perhaps eight or nine her father died and she was torn from her family by the Mexica (May-shé-ca) captors and sold to Maya slave traders. In the ensuing years she was sold multiple times, moved throughout the Yucatan Peninsula, and forced to do whatever was commanded of her; laboring in the homes and fields of those who owned her, perhaps being rented out as a sex slave. As she was moved from one culture to another she became fluent in Nahuatl and Yucatec, the languages of the Aztec and Maya people.
In 1519 with the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés at the city of Pontonchan, Malinalli's life changed forever. Faced with overwhelming military force and the loss of more than 200 warriors in a single day the city leaders provided Cortés twenty enslaved women as a peace offering, including Malinalli. Cortés was well aware of the importance of having someone who understood the language and customs of the people he would come to dominate and kept Malinalli for himself, giving her the name "Marina", and distributing the other 19 slaves to his staff. Malinalli was cleansed of her pagan ways through baptism into the Catholic Church, and it was not long before she learned Spanish, and eventually became Hernán Cortés' only interpreter. In the Aztec codices she is depicted noticeably and indispensably at his side in every encounter and negotiation with indigenous leaders and nobility. It is said that Moctezuma, in his negotiations with Cortés, addressed all of his correspondence to her.
In recognition of her status within Cortés' forces, the Spanish began to address her as Doña Marina. The title "Doña", was an honorific meaning "lady", and was not customarily used with slave women. The Aztecs too honored her and began referring to her as Malintzin, a combination of her birth name and a Nahuatl honorific. The Spanish, it is said, heard the name as La Malinche, and so the name remains. Her knowledge of language and customs allowed her to guide negotiations and enable Cortés to develop alliances with various tribes who had chafed under Aztec rule and create strategic partnerships with others.
In October 1519, Malinche reportedly saved the Spaniards from an impending attack, warning Cortés of an ambush in the Aztec city of Cholula after learning the group’s attack plan from an old woman. Cortés retaliated against the planned uprising by massacring thousands of Cholulans. Though many indigenous accounts blame Malinche for tipping him off, others suggest that the entire narrative was constructed by the conquistador himself to justify his bloody actions.
Regardless of the narrative, La Malinche’s presence on this occasion and others is perceived by many as having made the decisive difference between life and death. Cortés is said to have told a confidante, “After God, we owe this conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina”.
In 1522, just a year after the Spanish army overtook Tenochtitlan, current day Mexico City, Malinche gave birth to Cortés’ son, Martín. Shortly afterward, Cortés’ wife arrived in Mexico and he hastily arranged for Malinche to marry the conquistador Juan Jaramillo with whom she gave birth to a daughter. Not much is known of her life beyond this time, some suggest that she succumbed to smallpox at the age of 29, but it is not really clear when or how she died. It is here that Malinche transforms from an historical figure to a mythical one.
Malinche's rise came at an extraordinary cost to the lives of many Mexicans. With her help Cortés defeated Moctezuma, brought about the collapse of the Aztec empire, and ushered in a new era of Spanish domination. Many view her as a scheming woman who single handedly caused the defeat of her people simply to advance her own interests. On Independence Day 1861, in a speech by Ignacio "El Nigromante" Ramirez, he reminded Mexico that their defeat by Hernán Cortés was the direct result of the betrayal of the Mexican people by La Malinche; "Cortés's whore". Even today her name is synonymous with deceit and betrayal. To call someone "Malinchista!" is to call them a traitor.
But this version of history ignores a few simple facts. To say that she was a traitor to Mexico and question her loyalty to Native Americans perpetuates an ignorance of history. There was no Mexico in 1519. To those living on this continent, Mesoamerica was the entire known world, and it was made up of many ethnic rivalries with different cultures, languages, and customs. They competed for resources, the strong demanding tribute from the weak. It was an often brutal world, the Mexica had torn Malinche from her family and sold her to the Maya in Xicallanco, and now this small group of iron-clad men wanted to wage war on the Mexica. No one in her world would have imagined that she owed loyalty to the Mexica people, Moctezuma, or the people of Tenochtitlan, certainly not to all of Mesoamerica.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in Cortés' army, has provided the world with a first-person chronicle of the Cortés expeditions in which he lauds Malinche, relaying details of their conversations in which she claims that "God had been very gracious to her in freeing her from the worship of Idols and making her a Christian, and letting her bear a son to her lord and master, Cortés, and in marrying her to such a gentleman as Juan Jaramillo, who was now her husband, that she would rather serve her husband and Cortés than anything else in the world, and would not exchange her place to be Cacica of all the provinces in New Spain".
Bernal Díaz del Castillo's observations are part of the historical narrative that has been repeated for 500 years, but have now come to be recognized for what they are; an assertion of intellectual and moral superiority, having no more credibility than the public pronouncement and tidy narrative published more than 50 years after the death of Hernán Cortés, that he was perceived to be a god by the indigenous people, and that Moctezuma immediately recognized the divine right of the Spanish, Hernán Cortés, and the Catholic Church to rule these lands, and he surrendered his empire.
Throughout the conquest of Mesoamerica, regardless of the stories and perceptions of her power and the extraordinary influence she seemed to wield, Malinche was a slave. She was bound to serve her master, or die at his hands. One might also conclude that she had very little affection for the people, society and culture that had allowed her to be enslaved and ruthlessly exploited over and over again when she was still a child. Her imposed baptism into the Catholic Church stripped her of any ability to honor her own gods, but it was not done to merely convert her, she was baptized so that the Spanish could have sex with her and not be committing a sin. It's also interesting to remember that it was the Aztecs who added the honorific "tzin" to her original name elevating her status as a sign of respect and reverence. It is impossible to know for certain what Malitzen’s motivations were, because she left no written record. We cannot hear her voice.
Whether Martín, the son that she bore Cortés in 1522 was something she wanted or something that was forced upon her, we will never know. The same is true for her marriage to Juan Jaramillo, Cortés' captain, and the birth of her two daughters which elevated Malinche to the status of a free Spanish noblewoman, with all the rights and privileges of that class. What is clear is that once again her life course was altered to suit the needs of others. Her son, and her daughters too, were elevated to Spanish nobility and their prominence as members of the new mixed-race generation earned Malinche a new honorific: “Mother of The Mestizo Race.”
Two women dominate Mexican mythology; Our Lady of Guadalupe, an apparition encountered by Juan Diego just 10 years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and La Malinche. One, the virgin mother of all Mexico, the other a whore and a traitor, the mother of mestizos, often referred to as the Mexican Eve.
But history, it is said, is written by the victors, and the dominant Spanish version of history held Malinche in high esteem. Her fall from grace followed Mexico's independence from Spain in 1810 when the national political narrative evolved to view her as a traitor to the Mexican people. It's interesting to note, as Sandra Cypress does in her history of La Malinche, that "in the Catholic faith women were not supposed to talk in public. And Malinche talked. In Aztec culture, Moctezuma, was the Aztec ruler known also as Tlatoani or 'he who speaks.' Only the powerful spoke. And this slave woman broke the rules when she became not only a translator, but an advisor." But history is recorded by the strong - not the weak - certainly not by women.
In the 1950's Octavio Paz, Mexican poet and diplomat, interpreted the story of La Malinche as nothing more than a willing sexual partner of Cortés. Many view La Malinche and La Llorona as the same legend, archetypes of a woman both idealized and vilified, both women reduced to a symbol rather than an acknowledgement of a real woman's complexity. Dominant patriarchal thought has long relegated feminine experiences and attitudes to the realm of the less-than-crucial; women's knowledge is mere 'intuition,' women's talk is simply 'gossip.' Since the 1960's feminist movements, especially in Chicana literature, a few voices have begun to rescue Malinche's reputation. They see her as a woman who survived a life trapped between two cultures. Frances Karttunen, American linguist, historian, and author suggests in her recent book that Malinche offered her crucial services in self-defense: “This is no love story, no tale of blind ambition and racial betrayal, no morality play. It is the record of a gifted woman in impossible circumstances carving out survival one day at a time”.
I'm reminded of Ovid's story of Philomela in Greek mythology written more than two thousand years ago. Raped, mutilated by her sister's husband and left mute and unable to tell her story, she believes she is redeemed when she is transformed by the gods into a nightingale, a bird renowned for its song. But in nature, the female nightingale is actually mute, and only the male of the species sings.
Historians still debate how Malinche's life should be interpreted and her influence on the national identity of Mexico is the subject of a fascinating art exhibit that will open in February, 2022 at the Denver Art Museum entitled, La Malinche, Traitor, Survivor, Icon. The introduction to the exhibit states in part;
"We hope to illuminate the multifaceted image of a woman unable to share her own story, allowing you to form your own impressions of who she was and the struggles she faced. Five hundred years after her death, her image and legacy remain relevant to conversations around female empowerment, indigeneity, and national identity throughout the Americas."
In her 1973 poem Como Duele (How It Hurts), author Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell put it quite succinctly:
"P-nche, que dificil ser Malinche".
"F---, how hard it is to be Malinche."
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Bill Sheehan
Ajijic, Mexico - September 2021