La Malinche and the Treatment of Women in Mexican Culture

Introduction: The Virgin/Whore Dichotomy in Mexican Culture

The choices available to women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than those available to men. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: the pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual — the virgin or the whore.

Mexican culture is certainly not exempt from this tendency to place women on one side of a dichotomy or the other. In the case of Mexican images of women, however, this division of the female population into the chaste, good woman and the terrible, promiscuous one becomes complicated by issues of race and racial purity, by the historical condition of colonization and post-colonization, and by the partial displacement and partial incorporation of native belief systems by Catholicism in Mexico.

These many complications and elaborations of this essential — and essentializing — dichotomy about the true nature of woman can be seen coming together in the character of La Malinche, a figure not well known outside of Mexico except to those whose families originally came from there. This paper explores the figure of La Malinche, whose representations have over the years become at least generally more positive as Mexicans have regained a sense of themselves as a people worthy of self-respect, and as Mexican women have refused to see themselves as meriting only the role of a traitor condemned to silence.

La Malinche: Woman of Many Guises

La Malinche's image has changed substantially over time, from the years following the conquest of the Aztec empire by the Spanish to the present day. This change in large measure reflects shifts in the ways the Mexican people view themselves, but the various incarnations of the figure also result from the fact that she has different regional representations and has at times been joined in a form of cultural syncretism. Octavio Paz demonstrates in The Labyrinth of Solitude how shifts in the perception of La Malinche reflect larger shifts in self-perception among Mexicans — although such shifts in the perception of La Malinche may help to cause as well as simply to reflect those broader changes.

Her figure permeates the historical, cultural, and social dimensions of Latin American cultures. In modern times and across several genres, she is compared with the figure of the Virgin Mary, La Llorona (the folklore figure of the weeping woman), and with the Mexican soldaderas for her valor. The soldaderas were women who fought alongside men during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).

While her life has most certainly become mythologized, it also seems clear that there was a real, historical person called La Malinche — a template upon whom a number of cultural texts have been written. Something is known of her real life, though much is not. She may have been called Malinitzin or perhaps Malinali. She is also known by the name she received when she was baptized into the Catholic faith: Doña Marina. According to the account told by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a contemporary of La Malinche, she was born in the first years of the 16th century as a princess of the Aztec empire — a social position sufficiently high that she received an education far more extensive than that of most girls and indeed even many boys.

After her father died, her mother remarried and bore her new husband a son. La Malinche was now merely a stepchild of the family and was sold into slavery by her parents to the Mayan-speaking people of the south, who traded her to the Tlaxcalteca tribe in Tabasco. When she was 14, the people of Tabasco gave her as one of a score of women to Hernán Cortés, who in turn distributed them among his captains. Given first to Alonzo Hernando Puertocarrero, Doña Marina later became the companion of Cortés himself when Puertocarrero returned to Spain (Castillo 100).

La Malinche — not unlike Sacagawea — was invaluable to the colonizers because she spoke a number of different languages and used them to help Cortés draw various Indian nations to his side against the Aztecs:

"Without the help of Doña Marina we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico" (Díaz 101). Malinche would stand beside Cortés and translate his words or even issue instructions of her own. She was a key to his success in convincing other Indian nations to join the campaign to defeat the Aztec nation. She served, for instance, as interpreter between Moctezuma and Cortés.

La Malinche was for many years seen as nothing but a traitor — a woman who gave her body, her mind, and her intellectual talents to the enemy. Little acknowledgement was given to the difficulty of her own life: her enslavement by her parents, her being given as chattel to whatever Spaniard might find her useful, her rejection by Cortés when his Spanish wife arrived, and her death at the age of 24.

The word malinchista has been associated with La Malinche to designate a person who betrays his or her race and country — one who mixes indigenous blood with white European blood. Since the historical Malinche had a child with Cortés, she is considered the mother of the mestizo race (children born to Spanish-Indian parents).

Blame, Scapegoating, and the Politics of Betrayal

While for many years the figure of La Malinche was viewed in unequivocally negative — even evil — terms, she has begun to be reclaimed in the last generation, especially by feminists who view her original depiction as an attempt to blame her, Eve-like, for the weaknesses and self-hatred of men. It is time that women discover the Aztec Indian woman called Doña Marina by the Spaniards and La Malinche by her fellow Indians, and demand recognition of her as a true heroine. She certainly had as great an impact on the history of the New World as any woman, yet she has been belittled and defamed by male Mexican historians.

This analysis argues that La Malinche was blamed by Mexicans for betraying the Aztecs because Mexicans have been reluctant to admit that the Aztec empire would not have fallen — and thus Mexico would not have come under Spanish colonial authority — had other Indian nations in Mexico not collaborated with the Spanish.

The historians of Mexico have wished to write the history of their country as that of a people who fought bravely against foreign invaders and who were ultimately unable to succeed, not through any lack of courage or sense of cultural imperative, but through that age-old, Biblically nuanced story of men betrayed by a woman. One can see the appeal of such a narrative, which attributes to the Mexicans all of the virtues in the fight. Not only is it perhaps natural for people to consider themselves brave and virtuous, but given the terrible cultural and political consequences that attended the colonization of Mexico, it is easy to understand how later generations would want someone to blame for the cultural dislocations that followed. And who better to blame — as has historically always been the case — than a woman?

Perhaps unwilling to admit that the fall of the Aztec Empire was caused largely by a revolt of the tribes they had oppressed, Mexicans made Doña Marina a scapegoat. Some painted her as a traitor, others as a harlot. Information about her is scarce, but digging into the Spanish archives reveals the words of Hernán Cortés himself — the conqueror of New Spain and the man she served faithfully as interpreter, secretary, confidant, and companion.

But there is another element to the original and long-enduring disregard — and even hatred — cast upon La Malinche, one that Paz explores in nuanced analysis. La Malinche has been hated by many Mexicans until the most recent generation not only because of her perceived betrayal of the Aztecs but because of her role in engendering the entire race of Mexicans.

It is because Mexicans have for so long hated themselves, hated their own mixed heritage, that they have hated La Malinche, Paz argues. It is only when Mexicans come to peace with their own mestizo heritage that they can possibly come to terms with La Malinche and revere her as the founder of their race. It seems fairly certain that she was indeed Cortés's lover — and also that she was faithful to him. This should hardly brand her as a whore.

She also bore Cortés a son whom he acknowledged. Baptized Martín Cortés, he is the first "Mexican" — that is, a mixture of Spanish and Indian blood — whose name and history we know. As time went by, Cortés was offered many women and always gave them to other captains. Her linguistic ability assured Doña Marina her role as interpreter, and throughout the entire Conquest their relationship remained monogamous.

Conclusion

Cisneros has refused to accept for herself or for other Mexican women the stark choice of virgin or whore. So should all Mexicans. So should we all. The rehabilitation of La Malinche — from scapegoat and traitor to heroine and cultural founder — is not merely an act of historical revisionism. It is an act of cultural self-respect, one that acknowledges the complexity of colonized peoples, the agency of women within impossible circumstances, and the possibility of a Mexican identity that neither hates its indigenous roots nor romanticizes a lost empire.

Works Cited

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia de Conquista de la Nueva España. Madrid: Espasa, 1997.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove, 1985.

Rebolledo, Tey D., and Eliana Rivero. "Myths & Archetypes." Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993.