Malinchismo octavio paz biography

La Malinche by Rosario Marquardt, 1992

Malinche, the Nahua slave girl who became mistress of the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés, was also his interpreter, advisor, mother of his children, and a key figure in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. In Mexican popular culture she is perceived as the ultimate traitor, an Eve figure whose evil is located in her sex and sexuality. The Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in his famous essay “Sons of Malinche” depicts her as a treacherous whore who planted the seed of shame in every Mexican and is responsible for Mexico’s devastating sense of fatalism and enduring colonization. To be called a “malinchista” is, to this day, a horrendous insult.

In her engaging, challenging, and wonderfully illustrated collection of essays [Un]framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, activist-scholar, UCLA Professor, novelist, poet, and art critic, rejects the destructive, negating view of iconic Mexican women by the likes of Paz and reimagines women’s lives, past and present, “from a radical politics of recognition.” A Chicana lesbian writer hailing from the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez border, Gaspar de Alba’s sensitivities have been acutely trained to recognize “the racist, the rapist, or the homophobe in the room before that person even approaches”; she has translated this awareness into a scholarly approach “using the frame of Chicana lesbian feminism, which rewrites feminist epistemology by intersecting race, class, gender, ethnicity, language and decolonial theories with the lesbian/queer standpoint.” Though that mouthful may seem daunting, her perspective is instead refreshing, revelatory, and crystal clear. Her career-spanning collection — also including pieces on contemporary Chicana art, the murdered women of Juárez, and the detective novel genre — examines

“Malinchista” was a taunt I heard regularly during my childhood in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. “Malinchista” means traitor, but where did the name come from? 

As a history professor, I believe we need to take a closer look at Malintzin’s real story. 

Malintzin was a cultural broker who made choices under limited, rapidly evolving circumstances. Baptized “Marina” by the Spanish, she was Hernando Cortés’s translator and advisor during his war on Tenochtitlan (today, Mexico City) in 1519-1521. Though unfortunately we have few insights into how she may have viewed the relationship, Malintzin bore Cortés a son, Martín, symbolically called the “first mestizo.”

Historical sources from her time demonstrate that indigenous and Spanish alike generally respected Malintzin for her intelligence and linguistic ability. Evidence suggests she learned languages quickly. Indigenous and Spanish records portray her as an extraordinary individual.

Centuries later, Malintzin was maligned as a traitor. A nineteenth-century novel vilified her, but the notion was crystallized with Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz grappled eloquently with the foundation of the Mexican psyche upon conquest. 

The great writer may have intended to use Malintzin as a metaphor, but regrettably, popular culture has often read her choices too literally — and anachronistically. Maybe it speaks to larger issues around views of women. Certainly Malintzin’s story has complex threads of gender, sex, sexuality and motherhood, as Malintzin is known as the proverbial “mother of mestizos.” I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term malinchistas is used by Mexicans and Mexican-origin populations in the United States to refer to community members who “sell out,” adopt the value system of the dominant culture, and implicitly accept the terms of their own subordination. These persons seek to prove themselves as exceptions and embody traits associated with the dominant culture, while they shun those associated with their own. Malinchismo may be defined broadly as the pursuit of the novel and foreign, coupled with rejection and betrayal of one’s own culture.

This term is linked to the history and myth of a sixteenth-century indigenous woman named Malinalli Tenepali (Malintzin), popularly known as La Malinche or Doña Marina (c. 1502–1527). One of the most legendary figures involved in the conquest of Mexico, La Malinche was of Nahua origin and served as interpreter, guide, and concubine to Hernán Cortés (c. 1484–1547). Knowledge about La Malinche’s life before meeting Cortés is derived from the biography that the Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1495–1584) provides when he recounts La Malinche’s reunion in 1524 with her mother and half brother in his La historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, written in 1568, published in 1632). Díaz del Castillo states that La Malinche was a born a Nahua to royal indigenous parents in Tenochtitlán, experienced the death of her father and the remarriage of her mother, and was banished by her mother and enslaved to the Chontal Maya from the coastal area of Tabasco, whose cacique, in turn, gave her to Cortés, along with other virgins for sexual and domestic services, as a welcoming gift. She became Cortés’s lover, gave birth to two mestizo sons, and served as an intermediary and translator between Cortés and Moctezuma (c. 1466–

Nahua aide to Hernán Cortés

For the volcano in Tlaxcala, see Malinche (volcano).

Marina ([maˈɾina]) or Malintzin ([maˈlintsin]; c. 1500 – c. 1529), more popularly known as La Malinche ([lamaˈlintʃe]), a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521), by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519 by the natives of Tabasco. Cortés chose her as a consort, and she later gave birth to their first son, Martín – one of the first Mestizos (people of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry) in New Spain.

La Malinche's reputation has shifted over the centuries, as various peoples evaluate her role against their own societies' changing social and political perspectives. Especially after the Mexican War of Independence, which led to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, dramas, novels, and paintings portrayed her as an evil or scheming temptress. In Mexico today, La Malinche remains a powerful icon – understood in various and often conflicting aspects as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or the symbolic mother of the new Mexican people. The term malinchista refers to a disloyal compatriot, especially in Mexico.

Name

Malinche is known by many names, though her birth name is unknown. Malinche was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church and given the Christian name "Marina", often preceded by the honorificdoña. The Nahua called her Malintzin, derived from Malina, a Nahuatl rendering of her Spanish name, and the honorific suffix -tzin. According to historian Camilla Townsend, the vocative suffix -e is sometimes added at the end of the name, giving the form Malintzine, which would be shortened to Malintze, and heard by the Spaniards as Malinche. Another