Making Herself Indispensable, Condemned for Surviving: Doña Marina (Part 2)

4th Mar 2011

Dr. Fran Karttunen

This is the conclusion to Dr. Karttunen’s splendid article on the figure of ‘La Malinche’.

The most dramatic moment in her career was at the first encounter of Mote:ucz:ma and Cortés. Despite all the Aztec ruler’s efforts to divert them, the Spanish forces had reached his capital, and Mote:ucz:ma came face to face with their leader. According to later accounts, Mote:ucz:ma delivered a speech in the most courtly of lordly speech (perhaps dripping with irony), which Marina had no difficulty interpreting to Cortés. Cortés responded with a blunt speech that Marina transmitted to Mote:ucz:ma devoid of any of the honorific adornments due his personage. Then Cortés sought to enfold Mote:ucz:ma in an embrace, which the ruler’s attendants prevented. From that moment, if not before, Mote:ucz:ma’s power was drained from him, and Marina had been the instrument by which this was accomplished.

In the course of the conquest, Cortés- who had a Spanish wife in Cuba- fathered three daughters by three different indigenous women. One of them was a daughter of Mote:ucz:ma - a girl whom the Aztec ruler in his last days had entrusted to the protection of Cortés. Marina, on the other hand, was too crucial to the success of the conquest to be sidelined by pregnancy, and it appears that Cortés may have refrained from using her sexually until the fighting was over. Thereafter, Marina bore him a son, Don Martín, whom Cortés put into the care of one of his kinsmen.

Before the overland campaign through Maya territory, Cortés arranged for Marina to be married to Juan de Jaramillo, one of his lieutenants, and provided a handsome dowry. During the arduous trek through rainforest and over trackless mountains, Marina became pregnant for the second time and gave birth to Jaramillo’s daughter, Doña María. Not long after this, Marina died, still young and without seeing her children grow up. Having no personal memory of their mother either, Don Martín Cortés, Doña María Jaramillo, and their children nonetheless strove to keep alive a positive memory of her through probanzas, applications for pensions from the Spanish king in recognition of her service to the crown.

Although Marina’s children and grandchildren put together documentation to demonstrate the praiseworthiness of Marina’s role in the conquest, other forces were coming to bear to destroy her reputation.

There seems to have been no doubt of her unwavering loyalty to Cortés and the Spaniards under his command. Far from attempting to escape from them, she was credited by the Spanish chroniclers with taking the initiative in finding out plots against the Spaniards and warning them. According to the narrative of the conquest, she chose not to avail herself of the opportunity to switch sides and help the indigenous peoples defeat the Spaniards.

This has given rise to the concept of malinchismo, the betrayal of one’s own native identity through infatuation with the new and foreign. In this view, Marina was opportunistic at the expense of people with whom she would be expected to identify. After Mexico broke away from Spain in the early 1800s, her role as la gran conquistadora who brought Christian enlightenment and salvation to the benighted heathens, was exchanged for that of “mistress of Cortés,” a woman who used her sexuality to achieve her own ends. Ultimately this identity as La Malinche became merged with that of La Llorona, a ghostly weeping woman who lures men to their deaths and wails in the night for her children in whose death she herself has been complicit.

In visual and literary representation Marina, in the guise of La Malinche, has been grossly sexualized and made into a Mesoamerican Medea who kills her own children to punish Cortés for abandoning her. In fact, Cortés, having given his own father’s name to their son, successfully petitioned to have young don Martín legitimatized, sent him to Spain, and saw him invested as a knight of Saint James.

Malinchismo is a social construct that serves Mexican nationalism, but it is a classic case of blaming the victim. Marina’s son and daughter were not the first children born of indigenous mothers and Spanish fathers. Many young indigenous women fell into the hands of the Spaniards, and few survived for long. Their mestizo offspring and descendants struggled through centuries to eventually become the backbone of modern independent Mexico.

How can this long and tragic history be laid at the feet of a very young woman who had been deprived of her identity before the Spaniards even came on the scene? Marina’s inevitable fate was rape, not the making of tortillas. She had absolutely no choice about whether she would be sexually used, and very little control of by whom. When she was given to Cortés she had no one to turn to, nowhere to flee, no one to betray. She was not Aztec, not Maya, not “Indian.” For some time already she had been nobody’s woman and had nothing to lose. That made her dangerous, but it says nothing about morality.

This is no love story, no tale of blind ambition and racial betrayal, no morality play. It is the record of a linguistically gifted woman in impossible circumstances carving out survival one day at a time.

Further reading:-

• Frances Karttunen. “To the Valley of Mexico: Doña Marina, “La Malinche” (ca. 1500-1527).” In Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1994.
• _____________. “Rethinking Malinche.” In Indian Women of Early Mexico. Susan Schroeder, et al., eds. University of Oklahoma Press. 1999.
• Camilla Townsend. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. University of New Mexico Press. 2006.

Picture sources:-

• Pix 1, 2, 7 & 8: photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 3: photo by Juan Franco/Mexicolore
• Pic 4: Image from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Pic 5: from Wikipedia (La Llorona entry)
• Pic 6: photo by Sean Sprague/Mexicolore.

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Comments (9)

N1m3xicatl

31st Aug 2024

Malinche is always portrayed as a victim of circumstances, nothing can be further than the truth. Malinche knowingly and willingly chose to put her Indigenous people in a position to be slaughtered and enslaved by the Hispanic Invader’s, when we read the story of the Invasion of Anahuac by the Hispanic’s, we read that Malinche had plenty of chances to rejoin her Indigenous society by abandoning the Hispanic Invader’s. Instead she willingly chose to betray her Indigenous people by informing the Hispanic Invader’s of supposedly Indigenous plans to attack the Hispanic Invader’s, which resulted in the Hispanic Invader’s attacking unarmed Indigenous people, which resulted in unprecedented unarmed massacre’s. Malinche knew this would be the result. As far as being of Royal lineage, that is a Hispanic fabrication to attempt to rewrite Malinches humble roots. It is unheard of for anyone of Royal lineage to be sold into slavery. When they call Malinche the mother of the mestizo, we Indigenous Tlacame call her the Mother of massacre’s and enslavement. For her role in destroying our Indigenous World, malinche was passed down from Hispanic Invader to another Hispanic Invader, etc, etc. Malinche is no role model for any young Indigenous women.

Tzilacatzin

23rd Nov 2021

Malinche didn’t betray anyone. She was sold into slavery twice. First by her parents then by her people, the Mexica, to the Mayans. She was a woman without a home. Can’t betray a society that wanted nothing to do with you.

Mexicolore

Thanks for this very reasoned comment.

Tecpatl

17th Dec 2019

Maybe she had a hard life, but everyone does. That is no excuse to betray your people. I belive Malinche was a traiterous b.....

Mexicolore

Thanks for writing: we’ve slightly censored your comment as the language is a bit too strong for a young constituency...

Luís Ce Tecpatl

4th Sep 2016

Hello. Is there any way of knowing when was La Malinche born?
I know she was born on a day Malinalli (from which comes Marina, Malintzin, Malinche), but I would LOVE to know the specific day.
Thank you in advance! =)

Mexicolore

Actually we DON’T know if she was born on a Malinalli day. In fact, even if she had been, it’s very unlikely her parents would have named her after a day sign that was definitely an ‘unlucky’ one. As world expert Camilla Townsend (on our Panel of Experts) writes in her superb book Malintzin’s Choices ‘We do not know what name they gave her in the days following her birth... The girl’s earliest name is, quite simply, lost to us’. Sorry we can’t help!

Ashley

23rd Jan 2015

Thanks for the quick reply! Do you know the year in which the mural was painted?

Mexicolore

Yes, he completed it in 1976. The artist died in 1988.

ashley

22nd Jan 2015

Hello,
I’m working on a class research project on La Malinche. Do you have the name and location of the first picture you posted? It’s due soon so a fast reply would be extremely appreciated!

Mexicolore

Thanks for enquiring. The photo was taken in 1983 at a temporary exhibition displaying Cueva del Río’s screen mural in Mexico City - we think it was on display in the entrance foyer to the Polyforum Siqueiros on Insurgentes Sur. We’re not sure of the title of the screen mural, though it COULD be simply El Encuentro (The Meeting). We had the privilege of meeting Maestro Roberto on that occasion and being invited to his home studio. Where the screen mural is now, we have no idea!

Bob Cox

23rd Sep 2012

The legend of La Llorona, (The crying woman) goes back farther than Malinche, in a prehispanic codice written ten years before the conquest it mentions that Moctezuma heard a woman crying out over the waters of Lake Texcoco, “My Children, my children”but no one could find her. This was the beginning of the legend.

Helen H. Gordon

20th Aug 2011

Marina died in Spain around 1540, according to Sir Hugh Thomas in his wonderfully researched book “Conquest.” She raised her son and daughter in Spain, and her grandson gave a speech at a Spanish celebration chronicling her contributions to Spain.

tecpaocelotl

7th Mar 2011

I think of how people make her a victim mainly comes from the feminist movement.
I question her nobility especially if you look through depictions of her in other sources. I question Bernal Diaz’s writings especially about the part where they meet her mother.

Dr. Fran Karttunen