The year is
1521. After a three-year long siege, the Aztec island metropolis, Tenochtitlan –
larger than Paris, the biggest European city at the time – has fallen. Hernán
Cortés leads the Spanish into the vanquished city and re-names it Mexico City,
the capital of New Spain. This is an opening chapter in the centuries long
European domination of the Americas – but Cortés couldn’t have done it without
the help of a virus and a teenage girl.
In the sixteenth century, when
Europeans arrived uninvited on American shores, the Yucatan peninsula was ruled
by the Aztec Empire. The Aztec Empire was ruled by an ethnic group called the
Mexica who dominated a population that was ethnically Mayan – with Mayan being a broad term akin to saying
someone from Eastern Europe is Slavic.
The Mexica had once been a nomadic
people who filled the power vacuum left by the fallen Toltec Empire. To
solidify their rule, they formed an alliance with two other regional powers:
some historians prefer to call this empire the Triple Alliance rather than the
Aztec Empire. The Mexica built for themselves a tribute empire: the city-states
that came under their dominion were forced to send tribute, surrender lands,
and provide military service for the empire.
History tells us that people don’t
usually like to be governed by foreign invaders and the Mexica’s relationship
with the population of the Yucatan was no different. Some groups collaborated
and benefitted from Mexica rule while others suffered under occupation. Some
saw in the arrival of Europeans the opportunity to overthrow their odious
overlords. Many still independent kingdoms were at war with the Triple Alliance:
they saw the Spanish as allies in the preservation of their independence. The
Aztec Empire itself was rife with social and political turmoil.
Meanwhile, the Spanish had been
gobbling up territories in the Caribbean ever since their crash-landing on Hispaniola
(Modern Haiti/Dominican Republic) in 1492. During their island-hopping
expeditions, the Spanish began to hear rumors of a fabulously wealthy empire on
the mainland. So, Cortés kissed his wife goodbye in Cuba and set off in search
of it. By the time he first encountered the Aztec Empire in 1519, he’d spent 15
years actively searching for it, along the way encountering indigenous peoples,
converting them to Christianity, and gaining allies in his quest – as well as
transmitting smallpox to a population that did not have the built up immunity
to the virus that Africans and Europeans did. The Spanish did not yet know that
this virus would be their most important ally in toppling the empires of the
Americas and went about the business of making human alliances.
One such ally was the confederation
of four kingdoms called Tlaxcala who had been fighting off the Aztec Empire for
years. The Spanish cemented their alliance with the Tlaxcala through the
exchange of gifts and the marriage of one of the kings’ daughters to Cortés’
second in command. During an earlier occasion of making friends with the
locals, Cortés’ expedition were gifted twenty enslaved women, among them a
young woman (probably about 16 at the time) named Malintzin. The Spanish
baptized her as Doña Marina and sometimes called her La Malinche. They learned
very quickly that she could speak Nuahautl (the language of the Mexica) as well
as several Mayan dialects – and, in only a matter of months, she became
proficient in Spanish too.
Several decades after the conquest, conquistador
Bernal Díaz del Castillo put his memories to paper, giving us one of the most
extensive records of the conquest. Here is how he remembers Malintzin:
“…the twenty women
that were given us, among them one very excellent woman called Doña Marina, for
so she was named when she became a Christian…. Cortés allotted one of the women to each of his captains and
Doña Marina, as she was good looking and intelligent and without embarrassment,
he gave to Alonzo Hernández Puertocarrero. When Puertocarrero went to Spain,
Doña Marina lived with Cortés, and bore him a son named Don Martin Cortés…
Before telling about the great
Montezuma [sic] and his famous City of Mexico and the Mexicans, I wish to give
some account of Doña Marina, who from her childhood had been the mistress and
Cacica of towns and vassals. It happened in this way:
Her father and mother were chiefs
and Caciques of a town called Paynala, which had other towns subject to it, and
stood about eight leagues from the town of Coatzacoalcos. Her father died while
she was still a little child, and her mother married another Cacique, a young
man, and bore him a son. It seems that the father and mother had a great
affection for this son and it was agreed between them that he should succeed to
their honours when their days were done. So that there should be no impediment
to this, they gave the little girl, Doña Marina, to some Indians from
Xicalango, and this they did by night so as to escape observation, and they
then spread the report that she had died, and as it happened at this time that
a child of one of their Indian slaves died they gave out that it was their
daughter and the heiress who was dead.
The Indians of Xicalango gave the
child to the people of Tabasco and the Tabasco people gave her to Cortés. I
myself knew her mother, and the old woman’s son and her half-brother, when he
was already grown up and ruled the town jointly with his mother, for the second
husband of the old lady was dead. When they became Christians, the old lady was
called Marta and the son Lázaro. I knew all this very well because in the year
1523 after the conquest of Mexico and the other provinces, when Crist’obal de
Olid revolted in Honduras, and Cortés was on his way there, he passed through
Coatzacoalcos and I and the greater number of the settlers of that town
accompanied him on that expedition as I shall relate in the proper time and
place. As Doña Marina proved herself such an excellent woman and good
interpreter throughout the wars in New Spain, Tlaxcala and Mexico (as I shall
show later on) Cortés always took her with him, and during that expedition she
was married to a gentleman named Juan Jaramillo at the town of Orizaba.
Doña Marina was a person of the
greatest importance and was obeyed without question by the Indians throughout
New Spain.
When Cortés was in the town of
Coatzacoalcos he sent to summon to his presence all the Caciques of that
province in order to make them a speech about our holy religion, and about
their good treatment, and among the Caciques who assembled was the mother of
Doña Marina and her half-brother, Lázaro.
Some time before this Doña Marina
had told me that she belonged to that province and that she was the mistress of
vassals, and Cortés also knew it well, as did Aguilar, the interpreter. In such
a manner it was that mother, daughter and son came together, and it was easy
enough to see that she was the daughter from the strong likeness she bore to
her mother.
These relations were in great fear
of Doña Marina, for they thought that she had sent for them to put them to
death, and they were weeping.
When Doña Marina saw them in tears,
she consoled them and told them to have no fear, that when they had given her
over to the men from Xicalango, they knew not what they were doing, and she
forgave them for doing it, and she gave them many jewels of gold and raiment,
and told them to return to their town, and said that God had been very gracious
to her in freeing her from the worship of idols and making her a Christian, and
letting her bear a son to her lord and master Cortés and in marrying her to
such a gentleman as Juan Jaramillo, who was now her husband. That she would
rather serve her husband and Cortés than anything else in the world, and would
not exchange her place to be Cacica of all the provinces in New Spain.
Doña Marina knew the language of
Coatzacoalcos, which is that common to Mexico, and she knew the language of
Tabasco, as did also Jerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke the language of Yucatan and
Tabasco, which is one and the same. So that these two could understand one
another clearly, and Aguilar translated into Castilian for Cortés.
This was the great beginning of our
conquests and thus, thanks be to God, things prospered with us. I have made a
point of explaining this matter, because
without the help of Doña Marina we could not have understood the language of
New Spain and Mexico.” [Emphasis added.]
We can’t fully trust everything
Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote, but we know that her contributions were important to the Spanish, because they told us so themselves. Her presence was even
significant enough to be depicted in the codices drawn by the conquered indigenous
peoples to reflect the events. She is practically Cortes’ shadow:
After the early
conquest, we lose track of her. She gave birth to Cortes’ son, but Cortes’ wife
came from Cuba to join him and Malintzin was shunted to the side, married off
to another conquistador, and had another child. Historians believe she died not
long after that, no older than twenty-five, before the consequences of her
efforts could be fully realized.
La
Malinche’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, she can be seen as a
collaborator in the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Her name is a derivative
of an insult in Mexico that refers to people who love foreign culture more than
their own. One of the problems with viewing her as a traitor to “her people” is
that it applies a present day lens in grouping all indigenous peoples together
and suggesting they should have necessarily opposed all Europeans. It ignores
the fact that La Malinche did not consider the Mexica to be “her people” and
that she was a teenage girl who had been sold into slavery by her own family. She
was clearly quite intelligent and had probably learned a sort of opportunism at
a young age. In being Cortés’ mistress, she may have had little choice. In
being his translator, she may have seen the opportunity for her own survival
and advancement. If she had any sense of national or ethnic identity that she
was acting on, she had no way of knowing how catastrophically worse the Spanish
would be for the Mayans than the Mexica had been.
She
played a key role in one of the biggest military conquests in history. On the
other hand, her children may have been among the first mestizos – people of
mixed American Indian and European heritage, making her symbolically the mother
of the blended culture of modern Mexico: a fact that made her a symbol in the Mexican
Revolution of the 1910s – but, more on that next week.
Sources:
Women in World
History – includes primary sources and lesson plans! This is a great
resource for my teacher friends.
Born
in Blood and Fire, by John Charles Chasteen
1491: New Revelations of
the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann (Here
is an article from The Atlantic that summarizes some of the findings of
the book.)
World
Civilizations: The Global Experience, 7th ed., Stearns et al
