Such a thoroughly enjoyable read …

… it’s a shame, really, that I have to be critical of Malintzin’s Choices.

With Malintzin’s Choices, Camilla Townsend has crafted an eminently readable and highly gripping tale of the native woman at the heart of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.  The book reads like a novel, and while it passed the time enjoyably, it seemed to be full of emotional and impressionistic assertions that cannot be demonstrated or supported by the evidence.  Let me offer two examples.

On page 130, Townsend describes the political situation in Tetzcoco.  She writes, “when the Spanish came, Ixtlilxochitl saw a marvelous political opportunity and went to ally himself with them, hoping to gain control over the entire kingdom.  After the Spanish arrested and then killed Cacama, Coanacochtli — Ixtlilxochitl’s full brother — was able to replace him as king of the southern part of the altepetl, the part still known as Tetzcoco.  He did not share his brother’s desire to ingratiate himself with the powerful strangers; he simply hated them.”  This is an evocative passage that continues for another half-dozen sentences.  Yet, in this account, Townsend makes a number of questionable assertions without a single citation or mention of the source material.  Claims about desire, hatred, and hope create an entertaining story, but it is difficult to see how Townsend can know about the emotional states of these historical actors.  Still, such writing techniques need not necessarily be problematic, but in this episode, Townsend explains the actions of these figures by invoking their emotional states; these emotions, then, are acting as historical agents.  Such claims are both problematic and troubling.

On pages 44 and 45, Townsend describes an episode of the Spaniards’ misconceptions about indigenous wealth, taken from the account of Bernal Diaz.  Describing Malintzin’s response to the Spaniards’ misunderstanding, Townsend writes, “whether or not she actually made a joke of it that bright June day we will never know, but certainly she and the other women must have laughed to themselves more than once to see these great strong men with their remarkable machines turn out to be more gullible than they had ever known any of their own warriors to be.”  Words such as “certainly” and “must” seem overly bold and out of place in a sentence that is an interpretation based on inference rather than on textual evidence.  I am, however, willing to concede that Townsend is probably correct in making this inference from Diaz’s account, but at the same time Townsend goes too far with it in making the response to Spanish ignorance and gullibility a matter of gender.  It does not seem evident to me that Malintzin’s laughter originates from expectations about gender, but rather from an obvious cultural divide, from social and cultural expectations that may have something to do with gender, but are not ultimately based on gender.  I might be wrong, and Townsend may be correct.  But Townsend fails to offer any evidence or even supporting analysis for her reading of the text.  Instead, she simply wraps her assumptions in the language of facts and continues with her narrative.

I found such incidents of scholarly sloppiness on nearly every page of the text, and ultimately I found it very disappointing.  I am glad that someone has written an evocative account of the Conquest from a perspective that offers an alternative to the cultural, social, and gender assumptions that come from a mere rewriting of the Spanish narrative sources.  But I do think that such an account could have been more scholarly.  As a case in point, I would offer Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre.