Malintzin’s Choices

“La Malinche,” or “the fucked one” of Mexican myth is a contested figure—a figure that in 1982 still had the symbolic power to inspire student protests. Townsend explains, “As [the protestors] understood the situation, they were standing up for their nation’s sovereignty and speaking up for the downtrodden Indians” (4). La Malinche of the statue was a legend, a shadow, a tragedy, a traitor.

But Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin is a human being. Townsend weaves a tapestry of possibilities that humanize the legend. The real Malintzin, it seems, was above all a survivor, a woman who made pragmatic choices in awful situations. Townsend’s book Malintzin’s Choices does not claim to be a biography of Malintzin. Instead, it looks at her world as Malintzin might have seen it, and explores her choices in the context of the range of options that would have been available to her. Malintzin’s Choices brings historians one step closer to understanding the Spanish Conquest, and especially to understanding the range of choices that would have been available to indigenous women in that historical situation. Throughout the book, Townsend looks at the grim realities of the Spanish Conquest through the lens of gender. She deals with this violent time sensitively, and does not label perpetrators and victims, does not fixate on the gruesome. Townsend strives for balance, such as on page 127 when she describes indigenous human sacrifice and Spanish torture practices side by side, matter-of-factly, without sensational language or any resort to voyeuristic excess. It is this even-handedness which makes the book stand out.

Likely given to attacking Indians as a peace offering (22), and then traded to strangers from across the sea, it at first appears that the slave girl Malintzin did not have a lot of options. She was summarily baptized and probably expected to cook food and sexually service a Spanish conquistador. But she had grown up in a Mesoamerican palace, and she possessed the skill of using courtly language, and she chose to make the most of it. Townsend stresses that the choice to become an interpreter for Hernán Cortés was just that—a choice. When she heard Jerónimo de Aguilar speaking a dialect of Maya to the messengers of Moctezuma, “Malintzin could have remained silent. No one expected her to step forward and serve as a conduit. But by the end of that hour, she had made her value felt” (41). That decision would change her path forever. She became an important person, a valued interpreter, and acquired the title “doña” just like a Spanish noblewoman. She bore a child with Cortes, and seems to have maneuvered herself into an advantageous marriage afterward, securing her children a place in the New World that was being created in the sixteenth century. But Malintzin remains a liminal figure, betwixt and between several worlds.

Her son, Don Martín, inherits all this from her. As a six-year-old child, Martín is taken by his father Hernán Cortés to Spain, where the boy grows up at the Spanish court, in the retinue of Prince Philip. He is legitimized by a papal bull from the pope, and stands to inherit his father’s estate until Cortés remarries and has a second Martín, who, in many ways (and certainly legally via the inheritance) “would almost erase the existence of his older brother” (197). But like his mother, Don Martín survived, became a knight of Spain, likely visited the Tudor court of Princess Mary of England, and returned to Mexico in his late thirties only to be tortured under suspicion of a plot to overthrow the Audiencia (which he denied, even when his captors put him on the rack, and when that did not work, waterboarded him six times). This complicated man returned to Europe and was killed fighting Muslims for Spain. He died in another conquest, in another place.

Throughout the book, Townsend paints a very complicated portrait of Malintzin and the captive indigenous women whom she represents—in fact, this is a complicated portrait of the indigenous world during conquest. There are no clear lines between conqueror and conquered, just like Malinche is neither traitor, nor whore, nor hero. She is just a woman who did the best she could. And ironically, even had the Spaniards never come, she still would have lived her life as a captive, in a foreign land—it just would have had different contours.