Malintzin's Choices

An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

Camilla Townsend

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780826334060
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortés in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. "Malintzin, " at least, was what the Indians called her. The Spanish called her doña Marina, and she has become known to posterity as La Malinche. As Malinche, she has long been regarded as a traitor to her people, a dangerously sexy, scheming woman who gave Cortés whatever he wanted out of her own self-interest.

The life of the real woman, however, was much more complicated. She was sold into slavery as a child, and eventually given away to the Spanish as a concubine and cook. If she managed to make something more out of her life--and she did--it is difficult to say at what point she did wrong. In getting to know the trials and intricacies with which Malintzin's life was laced, we gain new respect for her steely courage, as well as for the bravery and quick thinking demonstrated by many other Native Americans in the earliest period of contact with Europeans.

In this study of Malintzin's life, Camilla Townsend rejects all the previous myths and tries to restore dignity to the profoundly human men and women who lived and died in those days. Drawing on Spanish and Aztec language sources, she breathes new life into an old tale, and offers insights into the major issues of conquest and colonization, including technology and violence, resistance and accommodation, gender and power.

"Beautifully written, deeply researched, and with an innovative focus, Malintzin's Choices will become a classic. Townsend deftly walks the fine line between historical documentation and informed speculation to rewrite the history of the conquest of Mexico. Weaving indigenous and Spanish sources the author not only provides contextual depth to understanding Malintzin's critical role as translator and cultural interpreter for Cortes, but in the process she illuminates the broader panorama of choices experienced by both indigenous and Spanish participants. This work not only provides revisionst grist for experts, but will become a required and a popular reading for undergraduates, whether in colonial surveys or in specialty courses."--Ann Twinam, professor of history, University of Texas, Austin

"In this beautifully written and engrossing story of a controversial figure in Mexican history, Camilla Townsend does a wonderful job unraveling the multiple myths about Malintzin (Marina, Malinche), and placing her within her culture, her choices, and the tumultuous times in which she lived. The result is a portrayal of Malintzin as a complex human being forced by circumstances to confront change and adaptation in order to survive."--Susan M. Socolow, Emory University

"Camilla Townsend's text reads beautifully. She has a capacity to express complex ideas in simple, elegant language. This book consists of an interweaving of many strands of analysis. Malinche appears as symbol, as a historical conundrum, and as an actor in one of history's most fascinating dramas. The reader follows Malinche but all the while learns about the Nahuas' world. It is a book that will be extremely valuable for classrooms but also makes an important contribution to the academic literature."--Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, professor of history, Carleton University

Notes

Introduction

1. “Chalca Woman’s Song” (see appendix). This version seems to have been a single example of a common subgenre of song, which would not have been limited to the Chalca.

2. Haniel Long, Malinche, Doña Marina (Santa Fe, NM: Writers’ Editions, 1939), 39.

3. Her image has been studied extensively. The best and most complete work is Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

4. Jean Franco, Critical Passions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 66.

5. Ricardo Herren, Doña Marina, la Malinche (Mexico: Planeta, 1992). Of the many purported biographies of Malinche, Herren’s is the best, the least fanciful.

6. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysender Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 86.

7. This incident, like several others, was brought to my attention by Anna Lanyon in her charming travel narrative, Malinche’s Conquest (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen Unwin, 1999), 205.

8. Ross Hassig, Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 53.

9. Diego Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala, ed. Luis Reyes García (Tlaxcala: Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, 1998), 183.

10. For the many ways in which this work is embedded in the work of others, see the bibliographic essay at the end of the volume.

One

1. FC, 6:172. I have used Dibble and Anderson’s edition of the Florentine Codex throughout, excepting only Book Twelve, retaining their use of “thou,” although “you” would be more accurate, because it does help to convey a high tone or ceremonial voice. Wherever I have changed their translations, I make a note of it: here, for example, I have changed their translation of ticiauiz from “thou art to drudge” to “thou art to labor,” as I believe it was only their own perception that feminine labor was drudgery. The Florentine Codex, of course, tells us what the Mexica believed, not what all Nahuas believed. It was not written by Malintzin’s people in Coatzacoalcos. However, the sense of the destinies to which male and female babies were born seems to have cut across Mesoamerican cultural boundaries. Thus I suggest that the midwife made a prayer to this effect; she might well have put the matter some other way. On the cleanliness practiced by Nahua healers, see Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

2. Through his father, Charles inherited the Burgundian duchy and was thus, in effect, head of state of the Low Countries. Isabella died when he was four, and Ferdinand when he was seventeen. At that point, he became King Charles I of Spain. When he was nineteen, his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, died, leaving open the seat of Holy Roman Emperor. The latter was an elected position: several small Germanic states chose their leader, who was also endorsed by the pope. When Charles was elected, he thus also became Emperor Charles V. Throughout this work, I will use the labels interchangeably, unless only one position is relevant to a particular situation. For more on Charles’s position at birth, see Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

3. The best synthesis of real-life practices, gleaned from postconquest mundane literature, as opposed to prescriptive and/or elicited texts, is James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). On naming practices, including the sample nicknames I mention, see pages 118–22. See also Rebecca Horn, “Gender and Social Identity: Nahua Naming Patterns in Post-Conquest Central Mexico,” in IWEM, 107. The Florentine Codex comes close to admitting that some adjustments were made to avoid particularly evil day signs; FC, 6:197. In sixteenth-century Tabasco, very near to the area where Malintzin was born, Nahua names did not include a numerical coefficient, as they did in the Aztec capital. A child’s formal name would be, for example, “Reed” and not “One Reed.” See France V. Scholes and Ralph L. Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians of Acalan-Tixchel: A Contribution to the History and Ethnography of the Yucatan Peninsula (Norman: University of Oklahoma, [1948] 1968), 61–63.

4. Ethnohistorical studies in the tradition of James Lockhart (see note 3, chapter 1) have made it possible to understand the Nahua mindset in ways that the prescriptive codices never could. Most such studies have explored the altepetl of the central valley; we do not have the records necessary to do a postconquest regional study of Coatzacoalcos that might shed light backward. What I have therefore included here are only the most basic cultural elements that seem to have been held in common by all Nahuas.

5. The question of Malintzin’s birthplace has been to some extent a vexed one, but in my opinion, it need not be. It was certainly in the region of Coatzacoalcos. In three separate legal proceedings that occurred within about a decade of her death, each with widely differing objectives, numerous witnesses who knew her well swore to her having been born there. Diego de Ordás made the statement in Spain in a hearing regarding her son’s entry into the military Order of Santiago. (“Expediente de Martín Cortés, niño de siete años, hijo de Hernando Cortés y de la india doña Marina,” Toledo, 19 July 1529, printed in Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 21 (1892):199–202. The original is in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Ordenes Militares, 34, E. 2167.) Cortés’s lawyers summoned numerous witnesses on his behalf to ratify his version of events when the Crown was having him investigated, and among the hundreds of facts that some of them were able to corroborate was the way in which he procured his translator and her place of origin (see Robert S. Chamberlain, “The First Three Voyages to Yucatan and New Spain, According to the Residencia of Hernán Cortés,” Hispanic American Studies 7 [1949]: 30; and, for an example of the testimony, “Descargos dados por García de Llerena en nombre de Hernando Cortés a los cargos hechos a éste,” October 1529–May 1534, in DII, 28:131.) Her daughter also referred to Coatzacoalcos in a long, drawn-out case over her inheritance (AGI, Patronato 56, N. 3, R. 4, “Méritos y servicios: Marina, 1542”) In that case, the daughter was trying to prove that she had a right to an inheritance. She could have lied about certain matters, but she had no motivation at all to lie about her mother’s birthplace. She also found more than twenty witnesses, who had been part of opposing factions in other regards, to back up her various claims, and several of them said they knew where her mother was from. See chapter 7 for a thorough discussion of the case and the ways in which we can and cannot trust the evidence it offers. Even the chroniclers, famous for their discrepancies, virtually all support the idea that she was from Coatzacoalcos. Only the name of her own altepetl is at all subject to doubt. The legal documents above give a version of the name “Olutla,” as does the probanza of her son’s son, Fernando Cortés (AGI, Patronato 17, R. 13, “Enumeración de los servicios de su abuelo y de doña Marina, su abuela,” 1592); the daughter and her witnesses also pair it with Tetiquipaque. Bernal Díaz confused matters by saying that her village was “Painalla” in Coatzacoalcos. All other Spanish chroniclers who mention the matter refer to Coatzacoalcos as the region, except for Francisco López de Gómara and those who copied him, who refer to Jalisco. Since he was presumably working from notes from Cortés, this is at first disturbing, except that he adds that it was in a place called “Uiluta,” and since Olutla is sometimes represented as “Oluta” or “Huilota,” he is clearly giving the same name. For a slave to have been brought from Jalisco in that era would have been virtually impossible; he must have copied some notes incorrectly. The Nahua informants for Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex mentioned Teticpac, as did Cristóbal del Castillo, a mestizo writing in Nahuatl at the end of the century; this could easily have been a singular version of the Tetiquipaque mentioned elsewhere. Diego Muñoz Camargo, a Tlaxcalan mestizo raised by people who knew Malintzin well, confuses many of the elements of her life, but he says with certainty that they knew her to speak “the language of the Mexica” (Nahuatl), “that of Cozumel” (Maya), and “that of Olotla” (Popoluca). Interestingly, the sixteenth-century scholar Francisco Cervantes de Salazar debates aloud the various stories of Marina’s origins and comes to the conclusion that serious scholars today have reached—that she was from a family of nobles in the Coatzacoalcos region, connected with Olutla and Tetiquipaque. See his Crónica de la Nueva España (Madrid: Hispanic Society of America, 1914), 1:164–65. That Olutla and Tetiquipaque were separate places, rather than variable delineations from a common reference point (like one person’s calpolli and altepetl), is made clear in that both were later listed as being given in encomienda to Luis Marín. See Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 189. For more on Olutla and Tetiquipaque, see note 10, chapter 1.

6. Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 143. Much has been written on the nature of Mesoamerican militarism. See especially Ross Hassig, Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). Pedro Carrasco has recently argued eloquently that the political alliances that formed were in fact stable enough for the Mexica government to merit the term “empire.” In one light, that is definitely true, and yet we must not imagine a bureaucracy as complex and effective as that of Rome, for example. See his book, The Tenochca Empire of Ancient Mexico: The Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

7. Frances Karttunen was the first to comment in depth on Malintzin’s linguistic abilities and what they demonstrate about her background in “Rethinking Malinche,” in IWEM. It is also worth noting that Diego de Ordás (see note 3, chapter 1) stated that he had been to Coatzacoalcos (and he had been, twice) and that he had seen doña Marina received as a peer by noble families there. Of course, it was his avowed agenda to demonstrate that her son should be received as a noble, and so what he said is suspect, but the specific way in which he put it rings true. If he were only interested in making the case,...