Traitor, survivor or influencer? Mexico rethinks story of conquistador translator Malinche

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — The woman long blamed for her role in the fall of the Aztec empire in 1521 is getting a modern makeover.

The Spanish called her Marina, pre-Hispanic peoples knew her as Malintzin and later she was renamed Malinche. Her work as translator and interpreter for Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés made her a protagonist in a violent colonial period whose effects still reverberate through Latin America. Her story, told only by others, generated myths and legends.

Was she a traitor to her people? The conquistador’s lover? A slave using her language skills to survive? Or someone with agency who influenced Cortés and shaped major events?

Five centuries later, the debate continues and Mexico’s first woman leader, President Claudia Sheinbaum, is weighing in.

Beginning Sunday, Mexico will kick off cultural events dedicated to reclaiming the story of Malinche with her pre-Hispanic name, Malintzin, on the anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas.

“We have a working group of anthropologists, historians, and philosophers studying this important, much-maligned figure, and it is very important to vindicate her,” Sheinbaum said recently.

Historians don't know the name she was given at birth around 1500. She learned Nahuatl and the now near-disappeared Oluteco, growing up south of the Gulf of Mexico. The Aztecs sold her as a slave to a Mayan people who later gave her and other women to the Spanish after being defeated in battle. By then, she could speak two more Mayan languages.

The Spanish baptized the women, providing religious cover for them to be raped.

She was "at their mercy as a victim," said Camilla Townsend, a historian at Rutgers University and an expert on Malinche. But she easily learned Spanish and “she saved her own life really by choosing to translate.”

Soon she would find herself in front of Moctezuma, the Aztec leader, in the imposing capital Tenochtitlan. As a translator for Cortés, she bridged two radically different worldviews, relaying the desires of Cortés and possibly trying to influence negotiations.

Some historical documents say she saved lives but she was also placed in complicated situations.

“She was forced to be an intermediary between the Spaniards and these other poor women who were going to be raped,” Townsend said.

Most academics today don’t see her as a traitor, because the Aztecs were her enemies in a world of constant wars between different peoples that only centuries later were lumped together as “Indigenous” in a violent colonial system.

Still, viewing her objectively is impossible, according to Federico Navarrete, historian at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, because the race and class conflicts left by the conquest persist. Yet, schools only teach a “nationalist” perspective, downplaying nuances such as the support of some Indigenous groups for the Spanish.

Yásnaya Aguilar, a Mixe linguist who has written about the Indigenous understanding of Malintzin, described her as “a native woman who moved from being a slave to being respected and honored by society in her time.” In fact, the name Malintzin was also used to refer to Cortés: they were considered one, but she was the voice.

The Spanish also respected Malinche. Townsend believes that Cortés agreed to give her in marriage to one of his main commanders – the only way for her to avoid returning to slavery – so that she would agree to stay on with him for the conquest of modern day Honduras.

She died around the age of 30, apparently in an epidemic. She had a son with Cortés and a daughter with her husband.

Malinche was largely forgotten until the early 19th century, when Mexico won its independence from Spain and Spain's allies became enemies.

She first appears as "a lascivious and scheming traitor” in a popular, anonymously published novel in 1826, so she became the perfect villain for the new country, according to Townsend. It was the Mexican governments that followed that imposed Spanish on Indigenous peoples.

Malinche’s negative image was solidified by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Octavio Paz. In his emblematic work of Mexican identity “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” Paz described her as “a figure representing the Indian women who were fascinated, violated or seduced by the Spaniards” and for whom “the Mexican people have not forgiven her betrayal.”

Her name became a symbol of sympathy for the foreign and contempt for one’s own. It carried an idealized romantic relationship with Cortés that historians consider uncalled for and that Aguilar characterized as “patriarchal and chauvinistic.”

It’s a caricature that has extended far beyond Mexico’s modern borders. “They call me Malinche too from the left for allying myself with white men … with whom we work against extractivist policies,” said Toribia Lero, an Indigenous Bolivian activist of the Sura de los Andes people.

Mexico’s Indigenous peoples, however, maintained respect for the woman, naming volcanoes, peaks and ceremonial dances after her. In some rural towns, girls are registered soon after birth to represent Malinche in traditional dances, Aguilar wrote.

Since the 1970s, Malinche’s negative image began to be questioned among Chicana feminists in the U.S. because they knew it was very hard to be a bridge between two peoples and they empathized with her, Townsend said.

Now there is a growing body of academic literature attempting to contextualize her life. And the Mexican government is joining the effort.

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