Sunday, September 10, 2017

Malintzin, Or, Who is that chick with Cortés?

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



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