La Malinche, also known as Doña Marina, Malinal and Malintzin, was a woman so maligned that I could write a whole essay on her — and, in fact, I have. I’ve even written a short piece about her on this blog before which you can read here, but Malinche is so compelling that I have to give her a full article.

Malinche is reviled throughout Mexico as a traitor, a whore, the ‘Mexican Eve’ who sold her people out and was directly responsible for their downfall. Today, her name is used as an insult against people who prefer foreign cultures over their own — they are malinchistas. Now, to pin the blame for an event as significant as the collapse of the Aztec Empire on a single person is pretty ridiculous anyway, but why would it land in particular on a translator who had been sold into slavery and was likely doing what she had to to survive?

Well, it is true that Malinche was indispensable to Hernán Cortés and his forces. Cortés himself wrote that ‘After God, we owe this conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina’. She was an intelligent woman, fluent in at least two languages — Yucatec and Nahuatl — when she was given to Cortés, and she shortly learned Spanish, meaning she was crucial in the communications between the Spaniards and the Aztecs. She was also tactically knowledgeable, and on more than one occasion she foiled a plot that could have meant the end for the Spanish by revealing it — ‘betraying’ it — to Cortés. 

In a way, then, we can see why some people see Malinche as a betrayer — or, as T. R. Fehrenbach puts it, ‘the ethnic traitress supreme’. But this interpretation makes the assumption that Malinche had a choice. And maybe she did, but that choice was more likely ‘serve Cortés or die’ than to do with which camp she owed the most loyalty to. She was, after all, still a slave, and no matter how much influence and respect she held, it could always be taken away.

Let’s forget that for a moment, though, and entertain this hypothetical choice Malinche almost certainly didn’t have. Little is known about Malinche’s life before Cortés and we have no written evidence from her directly, so what follows is what historians have been able to piece together. 

Malinche was born Malinal, the daughter of an Aztec cacique (chief). As such, she was afforded a high level of education, which is presumably where she first cultivated her natural talent for languages. After her father died, her mother remarried and bore a son for her new husband. Not wanting Malinal to threaten her son’s claim to chieftaincy, she sold her into slavery and staged a funeral to explain the girl’s disappearance.

Malinal was eventually sold to another cacique in Tabasco, who in turn gave her to Cortés, alongside a group of other women. The women were distributed amongst various men in Cortés’s army, including Malinal, but as soon as her talents were recognised, Cortés took her back for himself. At this point, Malinal was able to distinguish herself and earn a degree of freedom — certainly more than she’d had since her mother sold her. The Spanish afforded her the honorific title of Doña to her Christian name, Marina, and she was praised by many of those in command.

So, returning to the supposed choice, is it at all surprising that she (hypothetically) chose the Spanish? And if we think on the idea of betrayal, who was really the betrayer, and who was the betrayed? Did Malinche owe any loyalty to ‘her’ people — her family — who had sold her to slavers? Given the hypothetical choice, would you have done any different?

But here’s the thing — Malinche didn’t ‘choose’ the Spanish. Contemporary accounts, both Spanish and Nahuatl, show that Malinche was respected by both; as well as the Spaniards calling her Doña, the Aztecs named her Malintzin, adding the honorific ‘-tzin’ to her native name. These same accounts prove that she bore no ill will towards her native people, and Bernal Díaz de Castillo tells of how, upon meeting her own family again (including her mother and half-brother), she treated them with nothing but kindness. Whether this meeting actually took place or not is unknown, but the fact remains that Malinche was clearly concerned with peace, and her actions, rather than condemning them, saved many native lives.

All this aside, it is absurd to call Malinche the ‘ethnic traitress supreme’ when over 50,000 Aztec warriors joined the war on the side of the Spanish. Had it not been for their knowledge, skills, and manpower, the Spanish would have been defeated, Malinche or no Malinche.

But, as is so often the case for women who have been mistreated and misjudged by history, the real source of Malinche’s villainization has nothing to do with her role as a translator or communicator or betrayer of plots (which she had to have heard from somewhere…)

It is because she was Cortés’s mistress.

Around 1522, Malinche gave birth to Cortés’s son, Martín. This has been interpreted as the beginning of the mestizo population, mestizo referring to people of mixed indigenous and European heritage. Above all, this is what has marked Malinche out as a traitor to her people, even though all evidence suggests that she didn’t actually become Cortés’s mistress until after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.

This is another choice people seem to assume Malinche had when in fact she did not — it is highly unlikely she went willingly to Cortés’s bed (in that, being a slave, she would have had no other option), and there was certainly no love or affection involved in their relationship, if it can be called that.

But who cares about any of that, right?

Sources:

• Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517-1521, trans. by A. P. Maudslay (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928)
• Godoyal, Pilar, ‘Malintzin/La Malinche/Doña Marina: re-reading the myth of the treacherous translator’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 18.1 (2012), 61-76
• Campbell, Tether A., ‘A Victimised Woman: La Malinche’, Literary Law Enforcement, (2004), 28-39 (https://www.eiu.edu/historia/Campbell.pdf)
• https://daily.jstor.org/who-was-la-malinche/
• https://allthatsinteresting.com/la-malinche
• https://historyhustle.com/la-malinche/