Malintzin Malintzin Malintzin

Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico is an interesting take on how to tell the story of the conquest.  Basing a historical work on a woman that is almost invisible in the written record can be a daunting task.  However, I found Townsend’s book easy to read and possessing a flow of information that didn’t bog you down.   However, I must admit I liked the first part of the book better.  There was more explanation of the life Malintzin would have experience by the time the conquest came around in the book it became just more of retelling of the story we have already read.  In the final sections of the book it was interesting to learn what happened to her children and grandchildren but it became a more central focus.  I guess I would have likes more information about Malintzin and her life but unless her secret diary is found hidden away I don’t see that happening.  Also I felt like the intention of the book was misleading Townsend presents her work as Malintzin’s “choices” but really I wonder what choice she really did have.  I mean she did do things which brought her a great position which she would never have had but how much of that was just luck of the draw.  She could have never known what was going to happen to her and life was a matter of survival, she just played her cards better.  But all in all I did enjoy the book as a whole.  Townsend managed to get away from the stuffy facts of the conquest and the hero or the Cortes worship the primary documents are drowning in.  And what comes out is a story that focusing on the invisible and most important people of the conquest, the translators.  Malintzin managed to form a position for herself that was beyond that of any other woman in her own culture earning the respect of the conquistadors.  However, once the people who truly knew her died away and nothing was left of her own voice her life fell prey to the tides of history making her a traitor to some.  Many justify her actions by saying she had no other choice or she was making the best of the situation.  But in my opinion that is not what happened.  You can’t be a traitor if there is no unified entity.  The Aztec people were far form a unified people they were separate and independent forming there own ethnic states, who made war with one another.  Malintzin held no allegiance to these people and by the time she got back to her own homeland she was so far engulfed in the conquest that it didn’t matter at that point.  If she had been translating for another Native American group she would not have been branded a traitor.  But since it was the European invaders she was betraying her own people.