Making Herself Indispensable, Condemned for Surviving: Doña Marina (Part 1)

Doña Marina, ”La Malinche”, was the multilingual indigenous woman who provided to Hernán Cortés the means of communication necessary to carry Spanish conquest to the heart of 16th-century Mesoamerica. While very young she fell into the hands of Cortés and his men. Her best hope for survival was to make herself useful and agreeable, a strategy she had already learned prior to the arrival of the Spaniards on the scene. In the course of events, she asserted active common cause with the men who held her captive. For that, as La Malinche she has been punished for what seems to be all eternity.

Pic 1: Bronze figure of Doña Marina, detail from the Monument to Mestizaje, Mexico City

Her task required both multilingualism and mastery of “lordly speech,” the complicated mode of expression used by Mesoamerican nobility. These two skills would have been uncommon in a young man, but they should have been entirely nonexistent in a young woman. Daughters of Mesoamerican nobility lived very restricted lives. Closely guarded, they were rarely permitted to leave their residences, and they were prohibited from speaking freely. Under such circumstances, becoming a childhood bilingual was out of the question.

Pic 3: Aztec noblewomen, Florentine Codex Book 10

The women were said to be given to the Spaniards for the purpose of preparing their food. Cortés had them all baptized as Christians before making a gift of each of the women to one of his men.

This was when Marina acquired the name we know her by. It has been said that prior to baptism, her Nahuatl calendrical name had been Mali:nalli (“bunch of grass”) and that Marina was the Spanish name closest to that in pronunciation, but this is unlikely. The Spanish name Marina would, however, have been pronounced by Nahuatl speakers as Mali:nah, and the Nahuatl honorific suffix –tzin was heard and pronounced by Spanish speakers as –che, so by back-formation, Nahuatl Mali:ntzin (from Spanish Marina) returned to Spanish as Malinche.

Pic 5: ‘Malinche is presented to Cortés at Potonchan, March 1519’. Engraving from the Bancroft LIbrary, University of California

At the outset, when she was baptized, Cortés did not know that Marina spoke anything but the Acalan variety of Maya. Shortly afterward, he learned that she could interpret between Maya speakers and Nahuatl speakers. He immediately took her back from Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero, the man to whom he had given her, and set her to work as part of an interpreting chain. Marina spoke to Nahuatl-speaking emissaries sent by Mote:uczo:ma and translated what they told her to Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had learned Maya while a cast-away from a shipwreck on the Yucatan coast. Aguilar then translated from the Maya to Spanish for Cortés.

This two-step interpretation continued for a while, but apparently Marina quickly acquired Spanish, and thereafter she served as sole personal interpreter for Cortés.

Pic 7: Moctezuma, Cortés, Doña Marina, Gerónimo de Aguilar - part of one of the friezes beneath the statue to Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City

During the combat of the conquest, Marina was on hand night and day to interpret between the Spaniards and various indigenous groups. Because of the pervasive power of the Aztec Triple Alliance, if the people in question were not Nahuatl speakers, there was always an interpreter to be found to translate from their language into Nahuatl, and Marina then translated from Nahuatl into Spanish. On a campaign across the base of the Yucatan Peninsula, she translated from various regional dialects of Maya directly to Spanish.

Pic 9: From the first page of the final Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, recounting the Spanish Conquest, Doña Marina can be seen in her role as interpreter...