La Malinche, a real person in sixteenth-century Meso-American indigenous culture, is a contemporary Mexican American and Chicano folkloric figure. Linked with other folkloric myths such as La Llorona and La Gritona by contemporary feminist scholars and authors, she has become known as a borderlands (el otra llado) figure. In the La Malinche tradition, many different kinds of stories are told, featuring a range of themes including hope and pain.
Hernán (or Hernando) Cortés (1485–1547) Spanish conquistador, pictured arriving in Mexico accompanied by La Malinche, his interpreter and mistress. A figure traversing two worlds, La Malinche is seen both as the Mother of Post-Conquest Mexico and as a traitor to her own people. From a sixteeenth-century volume in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The historical figure, Malinalli, or Doña Marina, is the only woman and former slave specifically mentioned in The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In his memoirs Hernán Cortés also mentions her as indispensable in defeating the Aztecs. She has been portrayed in Mexican American folklore, art, and literature as a symbol of treachery because of her pivotal role as a translator, an adviser, and a collaborator in the Spanish conquest of Mexico (Wyatt 1995). In contrast, she is also seen by some as the mother or founder of post-Columbian Mexico, with her son being the first true Hispanic, or mestizaje.
Her birth name, Malinalli, or “bunch of grass,” was in honor of the Mayan goddess of grass, upon whose name day she was born. She was most likely born in the Nahua region (Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) sometime in the late 1490s. Her ability to learn multiple languages, (including Mayan, Nahuatl, and other very specialized local dialects) was unusual for a girl, even one of noble birth. She was a talented linguist and very adaptable. Having lived in several different parts of the then Aztec-ruled region, she proved herself very capable of becoming fluent in multiple languages. Her ability to pick up languages made her quite valuable in the Spanish conquest of the region because she could fluidly translate between the Spanish and the tribes with which they wanted to negotiate.
In 1519, she was one of a group of twenty female slaves given to the Spanish conquerors, purportedly as an attempt to bribe them to move on to other lands. These slaves were granted to the Spanish as cooks, but La Malinche had other, less domestic talents. For example, she learned the Spanish language after a period of three-way translation between Cortés, the leader of the Spanish conquistadors, a Spanish priest named Jerónimo de Aguilar, and herself. Once she became fluent she eliminated the need for other intermediaries. Her facility with multiple languages gained her special status with Cortés, to whom she served as primary translator. Cortés had her baptized as a Christian, and she took the Christian name Marina supposedly because of its similarity to Malinalli. She was also granted the honorific Doña, which meant she was considered a lady, or of noble birth. Spanish conquistadors who wrote of her spoke of her vital importance in the mission to conquer Mexico, and she is frequently pictured in contemporary historic documents standing right next to Cortés, in a not very subservient role. One such depiction is in the 1519 codex History of Tlaxcala by Diego Muñoz Camargo, where she is shown standing directly behind Cortés, dressed in native attire and pointing a finger as though directing him. Another is The Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century document by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún where she stands directly between Cortés and the natives with whom the Spanish are negotiating.
In her role as translator and adviser, not only did she translate between the native peoples but often conducted negotiations on her own. She reportedly used her inside knowledge to warn the Spanish of a planned collaborative uprising of the Cholula and the Aztecs. This uprising might have succeeded against the far-outnumbered Spanish forces. Because of this Malinalli is known as the betrayer of the native peoples. In fact, in modern-day Mexico, the word malinchista refers to someone who has betrayed his or her country. However, many people argue that in her role as interpreter, La Malinche helped save the indigenous people of the region from further death and destruction, preventing the Spanish from having to use more deadly force during their conquest. Others believe that without her intervention, the Aztecs eventually would have learned to adapt Spanish methods of warfare, thus allowing them to hold their own against the conquistadors. Thus, her legacy is mixed; she is seen as either a savior or a destroyer, depending on the sensibilities of the storyteller.
She was Cortés’s mistress, giving birth to his son, Don Martín Cortés. Later, she married Juan Jaramillo, a Spanish hidalgo, with whom she had her second child, Doña María Jaramillo. Malinalli died sometime in the 1550s. Her children petitioned the Spanish crown, through probanzas, to acknowledge her service to the crown in the conquest.
La Malinche has been associated with La Llorona, or Weeping Woman. La Llorona is a ghost who drowned her twin children, and she is cursed to haunt the banks of the river in which the children died. She wails and cries loudly as she haunts the riverbanks, crying “Ay, mi hijos” (Oh, my children). Some modern-day myths and legends conflate La Malinche with La Llorona, asserting that Malinalli was the woman who drowned her children, the offspring of Cortés, when the conquistador left her for another woman. Some people say that La Llorona’s betrayal of her children represents the native peoples whom she was responsible for killing. Both La Llorona and La Malinche are the ghostly figures of women filled with vengeance and treachery. In this way, she has also been associated with La Gritona, the “hollering” woman, who screams in warning and pain at the curse she endures.
There are many artistic depictions of La Malinche/Malinalli in Mexico and the United States. Some depict her as a heroic figure, as in a bronze statue that is part of the Monument to Mestizaje (people of mixed racial ancestry) in Mexico City. There she sits next to Cortés and their son, regally pointing toward the future. Diego Rivera depicted her in his mural On the History of Mexico in the Palacio Nacional de Mexico as a seductive, provocative figure. In Rivera’s image, La Malinche is hiking up her skirt to reveal traditional tattooed legs while ignoring the dismembered arm another figure offers to her. Other fellow indigenous people are depicted being examined as if for sale. Contemporary Chicana writers (such as Sandra Cisneros, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, and Laura Esquivel, to name only a few) have attempted to reimagine the figures of La Malinche and La Llorona, seeing them not as deadly villains but as victims of the Conquest who had no choice but to participate in their own destruction at the hands of the Spanish.
Kimberly Ann Wells
See also Casos, Historias, and Tallas; La Llorona or Weeping Woman; Murrieta, Joaquín
Further Reading
Cypess, Sandra Messinger. 1991. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gordon, Helen Heightsman. 2011. Malinalli of the Fifth Sun: The Slave Girl Who Changed the Fate of Mexico and Spain. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.
Karttunen, Frances. 2011. “Making Herself Indispensable, Condemned for Surviving: Doña Marina.” Aztecs at Mexicolore. http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/spanish-conquest/dona-marina-part-1. Accessed September 9, 2015.
Maura, Juan Francisco. 1997. Women in the Conquest of the Americas. Translated by John F. Deredita. New York: Peter Lang.
Townsend, Camilla. 2006. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Wyatt, Jean. 1995. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (2): 243–271.