Evolving Images of La Malinche - Research Paper Example

?Malinche number Evolving images of La Malinche Malinche, also known as Malintzin, Malinalli and Dona Marina, is considered one of the controversial players in the Spanish conquest of the Mexica Empire. As the Indian interpreter to Hernan Cortes, she played a very crucial role in the Spanish conquest. While no one questions her significant contribution to the Spanish victory, some have questioned her origins and many continue to debate her motivations; accordingly she characterized as an asset or as a traitor. This paper discusses the different aspects that surround the life of Malinche, ranging from different accounts of the historical life and existence of Malinche to changing images and perceptions of this important figure over time. According to Hampton,1 Malinche was born to chief Oluta, who was a member of the royal house of the Aztecs in 1502. 2 Her father died when she was still very young. According to the culture of her people, she was the sole heir of her father’s wealth and position as the chief. This, however, never happened. Malinche’s mother remarried and had a son with her stepfather. Her mother and stepfather then formulated a plan and sold her to slave traders, for her son to remain the sole heir of the throne. In her plan, Malinche’s mother took advantage of the death of one of her slave’s daughters. She blackmailed this slave and ended up burying the slave’s daughter as Malinche. 3 The slave was told to remain silent, or be sent away with the merchants who were buying slaves. 4 Not all sources concur on Malinche’s origin. However, it has been established by Joan Hershafield that she was a Nahuatl with the original name of Malimalli. Her province of birth was Coazacualco. According to the author, stories of Malinche’s slave life that led her to Cortes are contradictory. On the one hand, Lee Stacy presents Malinche as a member of the royal house of the Aztecs and the legal heir of her father’s throne as do sources in the previous paragraph. However, on the other hand, Hamptons contradicts that information, blackmails the family relations of Malinche, and argues that she was the daughter of a slave. The translation process was long-drawn-out, involving the Spanish, Mayan, and Nahuatl languages. When Cortes wanted to communicate with Nahuatl speakers, among whom were the influential Mexica or Aztec people, he would first tell Jeronimo de Aguilar, who would then translate into Mayan for La Malinche, who then further translated Cortes’ statement to the Nahuatl speakers, those reply was communicated by the reverse process. Due to this three-way interaction, the Nahuatl-speakers called her Malintzin. The Spanish upon hearing the natives calling her Malintzin, tried calling her the same, but their mispronounced version was Malinche. 5 Hampton tells us that La Malinche’s father placed a golden necklace around the little girl’s neck and said, “That this necklace will be the sign forever that shows you are a member of the Royal Aztec house, and your name is Malintzin.” 6 The Mexican citizens considered Malinche a traitor because she was Cortes’ mistress and was his translator. When she was baptized, she adopted a new name because she had no choice. Having been sold by her own mother into slavery, she had no choice but to obey the ways of slavery. Slavery led her into Cortes hands. Castillo, Bernal, Janet Burke and Humphrey tell us that Malinche that she was under captivity in Maya before being offered to Cortes as a war trophy by the Maya people. 7 Cortes wanted to conquer Mexico no matter what. It was one of his targets. Malinche, therefore should, not be blamed for some other person’s political and personal interests. Appreciation should be given to Malinche for making negotiations possible. 8 Levesque suggests that Malinche willingly offered herself to Cortes, making her a betrayer to Mexico. 9 She is considered a representation of Mexico’s Eve, man’s first other and Christian history’s first mother/whore. Eve was a symbol of man’s expulsion from paradise and the cause of bodily death, although God made her for purposes of reproduction of the race. In Mexico, Malinche provided a specific local sign for the communication of patriarchal nationalism. By considering Malinche as a traitor, the destruction of indigenous people is placed on her, and the blame lifted from the real players who are Montezuma and Cortes. This perception also ignores the main historical outcome of the conquest. A lot of things changed, except the change of power from one patriarchal colonial state to another. Some feminist scholars have analyzed previous perceptions about La Malinches noting that they do not consider certain factors. One of such factors is that La Malinche was forced to take up the role of a translator and a mistress, to protect her own life. 10 Some historians, such as Hershfield who focuses on films’ portrayal ofd Malinche , argues that if Malinche is considered the mother of Mexico, 11 then Mexicans are born of a whore. And if she is their mother, then Mexicans must consider as their father either the conquered Indian Montezuma or the conquering Spaniard Cortes. Either way, Mexicans are still considered sons of a violated mother. For this reason, they do not accept her as the mother of Mexico, or as the mother of the nation of mestizos, as Levesque refers to her. 12 Other critics do not agree with the perception of Malinche as a traitor noting that hers was just a response to the trends at the time. The formulation of La Malinche’s legend and the establishment of the idea of nationhood are directly linked in the stories. This is because people wanted to invent myths of origin, family of founding traitors, heroes and a fatherland in the bygone times. 13 Hershfield also notes that the figure of La Malinche could not be an accurate one because her character has been revised several times in Mexican myths and history narratives. The Spaniards portrayed la Malinche as a powerful woman in the sixteenth century, whose crucial translations had facilitated the conquest. She deserved their respect; and the indigenous writers were not about to challenge the positive Spanish vision. This view, however, began to change in the nineteenth century when Mexico was fighting for independence from Spain. Since then, her place has changed to that of a traitor. She had, during her time, encouraged the indigenous people to unite with the Spaniards and destroy the Aztec. She had helped interrogate not only Montezuma, but Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor of the Mexica, during his time as a prisoner, who was executed by Cortes. She disclosed the Cholula Indians’ plan to ambush the Spaniards, bore a son to Cortes, and later, a daughter to Juan Jaramillo, one of the conquistadors. These examples were used to show her treachery nature. She was changed from being a respectable person to a woman of a sexual voracious nature. She was considered full of lust for European men, and one who never wanted her children to be fathered by indigenous people. She formed a new concept that the Mexicans used to describe betrayal or rejection of one’s native roots, and worship of anything foreign. Since then, she became a powerful symbol of cultural betrayal among modern Mexicans. 14 La Malinche’s worthiness as a mother to the Mexicans–particularly the mestizo–has also been questioned, because she allowed Cortes to take her mestizo children to Spain separating them from her. This is just a myth, according to Stacy, among others. The truth was that the children were taken to Spain only after their mother’s death. For others, La Malinche represented a grieving mother mourning her lost children. Her lost children in this case represented the colonialism’s victims. In this representation, she was compared to La Llorona, a frightful ghost who cries for her children at night. 15 The twentieth century came with perceptions about La Malinche, particularly initiated by the Mexican Revolution of 1910. As written by Cypress and Sandra the muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, for example, portrayed her and Cortes as cold hearted people by painting a picture of both naked and resting their feet on a corpse. 16 This could mean that they enjoyed killing people; they killed so many people that they had some to rest their feet on, or that they never cared at all about the deaths of the people so long as they got what they wanted, or that they came first, the rest were rags. Orozco’s rendition influenced other literary depictions of La Malinche covered in comic books, dance, theatre, paintings and calendars, as well as by literary figures, such as Octavio Paz. 17 Stacy is of the opinion that La Malinche as the cause of all Mexican male ego problems. She was the cause of women-hating, violent and lonely characteristics that men showed due to male shame of one of their own, letting her body be used sexually by Cortes and giving birth to the nation of Mexico. 18 Most of Stacy’s perceptions about Malinche are similar to what the Mexican people think and interpret about her role in the conquest, the Mexican society, and the world. Such perceptions (Stacy’s) have revealed her as treacherous and cold-hearted (Orozco’s perception) while other perceptions, such as Harshfield’s, defend her, arguing that she had no other option. Harshfield also considers her a hero of the Mexicans. That is why Harshfield stated that La Malinche was forced to take up the role of a translator and a mistress, to protect her own life. In conclusion, although we know that La Malinche served the Spanish conqueror of Mexico as an essential interpreter, our knowledge of her is surrounded by myth and contradictory accounts. Mexican culture has affected the image given to her over time. The circumstances surrounding her actions, as well as her true nature and personality, are unknown. Whether she wanted revenge against her own people, or was protecting them from the conquerors’ violent ways, is unknown. It is plausible that she was trying to destroy what was originally hers, but had been taken away from her unjustly by her Aztec mother. During her time as Cortes’ interpreter, she encouraged other communities to join the Spaniards and defeat the Aztec people. Some books, however, note that their origin is not documented. She could just have been a slave with knowledge of the Nahuatl language, although most sources and stories about her birth and origin state that she was of Aztec and noble origin. La Malinche has many representations. At one extreme, she could have been the best diplomat, the woman who came from slavery to be a savior by helping bring Christianity and European cicvilization, or at the other extreme, she was the traitor, the violated mother of Mexicans, an Eve, the whore, and many other despicable labels. Her representation depends more on one’s opinion of of the Spanish conquest and what it did to Indian civilization than on facts about who she was. Recent Chicana feminism has undertaken to recover La Malinche as more than a traitorous whore, however, claiming her power as a strong female figure. Feminist theorists, such as Cypress, 19 have shown that not only did La Malinche mediate her own success as an important figure in the new Spanish empire but that she also negotiated for the interests of native groups. In any case, despite the discrepancies in how La Malinche’s personal character is portrayed in history and folklore, we know that she occupied a crucial role in the founding of Mexico as a Spanish colony and that her translations led to the dawn of a new era for Europeans and indigenous peoples alike. As Sandra Messinger Cypress claims, “For many feminist critics today, the use of voice by La Malinche, her role as spokesperson, marks one of the most striking—and positive—disruptions of the patriarchy on both the indigenous and European sides.” As a woman of power and voice, La Malinche was indeed a rare figure in her time. Furthermore, as legend attributes to her affair with Cortes the creation of the Mexican “race,” her maternal body propagated, in myth at least, the beginning of a nation of truly Mexican people, part European and part Indian. In this way, feminists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries like Cypress have begun to transform La Malinche into a powerful figure representative of both womb and tongue. Work cited Cypess, Sandra Messinger. 1991. La Malinche in Mexican literature from history to myth. Austin: University of Texas Press. Di?az Del Castillo, Bernal, Janet Burke, and Ted Humphrey. 2012. The true history of the conquest of New Spain. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Pub. Co. Hampton, Betty. Malinche. Pennsylvania: Dorrance Publishing, 2010. Hershfield, Joanne. Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940-1950. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Joanne Hershfield, Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940-1950 (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1996) Le?vesque, Rodrigue. 2007. La Malinche the mistress of Hernan Corte?s from slave to goddess : a true story based on historical documents with 90 illustrations. Gatineau, Que?bec: Le?vesque Publications. Le?vesque, Rodrigue. 2007. La Malinche the mistress of Hernan Corte?s from slave to goddess: a true story based on historical documents with 90 illustrations. Gatineau, Que?bec: Le?vesque Publications. Levesque, Rodrigue. La Malinche: The Mistress of Hernan Cortes, from Slave to Goddess: A True Story Based on Historical Documents with 88 Illustrations. Quebec: Levesque Publications, 2008. Seed, Patricia. Jose Limon and La Malinche: The Dancer and the Dance. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2008. Stacy, Lee. Mexico and the United States. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2002. Read More