Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

"Malintzin was born in a small town in coastal Veracruz state by the Gulf of Mexico in the twilight years of what we now call the Aztec Empire, which was based in Central Mexico. There’s a lot that we don’t know for certain about her life. She’s apparently the daughter of a local nobleman or one of that nobleman’s less important wives or concubines. You had a system of polygamy in the Mesoamerican cultural world at that time, at least for higher-ranking people. We don’t know her real name; we don’t know what name she was called by after she was born. When she was between eight and twelve years old, she was given away to (or maybe captured by) Nahua slave traders—merchants associated with the dominant Aztec Empire. She was then sold as a slave to a Maya town down the coast and a few years later she was given by her new owners as a peace offering to the Spanish conquistadors, who had just arrived on the Mexican coast. “Mexico has played a crucial role in modern global history” The interesting thing about Malintzin’s life, and what Townsend’s book is about, is how this woman of very obscure origins, from a powerless, subordinate social position, became one of the most important players in what we have come to call the Conquest of Mexico. Part of what makes the book by Townsend so fascinating is that this is a life that we can know very little about because people didn’t bother talking about obscure women in the historical record. But based on Townsend’s extensive knowledge of the cultural world in which Malintzin grew up, and based on her mastery of native language sources, she is able to piece together a plausible story of what Malintzin’s life was like, what her motivations were, and things like that. Malintzin quickly learned to translate from Nahuatl into Spanish and therefore became a critical intermediary in the Spaniards’ dealings with the people of Central Mexico. The story of Malintzin’s name is interesting. The Spanish name her Marina. And because she takes on this really important role as an intermediary, the indigenous people of Central Mexico with whom she comes in contact give her a common honorific. They add the syllable ‘tzin’ at the end of her name, so she’s no longer Marina but Marintzin. But those people can’t pronounce the Spanish R, so they say it as an L and she becomes Malintzin. But that’s not where the story ends. Today, it is considered more respectful to refer to her as Malintzin. That is certainly what Townsend thinks, because that is what indigenous people called her, and it also does justice to the status that she’s able to achieve. In fact, the Spaniards don’t understand Nahuatl, and they don’t hear the Nahuatl pronunciation right, and so they don’t call her Malintzin, they call her Malinche. For the longest time, if you were talking about her you would talk about ‘La Malinche.’ She became the reviled symbol in Mexican history for Mexican nationalists of an indigenous traitor making common cause with the enemy. Malinche was the wrong way of referring to her because it was how the Spaniards misheard the Indigenous pronunciation of her name, which was in itself a garbled and modified version of the name the Spaniards had originally given her. It became a very pejorative way of referring to her. With the series of events and processes that we usually call the Conquest of Mexico, everybody was caught up in something that was much larger than themselves and of which they could control very few parts. There were many people in similar situations, in the sense that—and this is a major corrective that historians like Townsend have recently brought to early colonial Mexican history—probably the majority of indigenous people with whom the Spaniards came in contact were—or, after early defeats, very quickly became—their collaborators, but in a subordinate position. “She is able to piece together a plausible story of what Malintzin’s life was like” Malintzin was a collaborator and she was also a victim, but what’s fascinating is what she was able to do with the hand she was dealt. Consider again her position. She’s given away when she’s eight years old. She’s sold into slavery. She’s then given as a slave to these new conquerors. She’s presumably sexually used by her previous owners as a teenager, and she’s certainly sexually used by the Spaniards. Her labour is being exploited. She has to do what she is told. Because of her linguistic gifts, she realises that she has something that her new owners want. She’s able to leverage that gift—with what we must assume is a lot of pluck and courage and quickness of mind and intelligence and strategic thinking—into a power, and she becomes this ambiguous authority figure. Towards the end of her life, she manages—and this is an argument that Townsend makes—by shrewdly assessing her situation and trying to figure out what she can do, to secure a comfortable life for herself. For a while, she’s Cortés’s concubine and bears him his first recognised son. Later, she marries another Spaniard, who is not a leader like Cortés but is still quite important in the hierarchy of the Conquest of Mexico. She passes away in 1529 from a European disease. At that point, she is, in the context of recently conquered Mexico, certainly one of the most powerful women around."