La Malinche, Marina, Malintzin, and Malinali

and giving myself more time to research

Note: This story was first shared under “Unpopular Stories of Mexico.” The newsletter is now called Tinta y Miel—a space where I continue to share stories from Mexican history, now blended with art, journaling, and creative reflection, because I’ve realized I don’t want to separate history from creativity. I hope you’ll stay as I continue to try and make meaning, con tinta y miel.

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Let’s start with the subtitle: Giving myself more time to read and research. Somewhere along the way, I became a slow reader, less of a reader. As I started writing more, the way I read changed too. And now I miss so much getting lost in a book, living in that world for a while, ignoring the craft of writing, not willfully, but because I knew that I knew nothing about writing, except that I could read it and enjoy it. Something has changed though and I can no longer get lost as I did. Maybe it’s the busyness of life, maybe it’s that now that I know I am a writer too, I compare my writing and become anxious. My interests have also been changing. If you are here, you know that one of my current interests lies in learning about the history of Mexico, and with the quick and easy availability of technology a lot of what I’m learning I’m acquiring through the internet: YouTube videos, the UNAM website, article searches on Google Scholar, etc., I want to start reading books again though. And with that, give myself more time to research what I want to share. I thank you for your patience and for taking the time to read what I write. It means a lot!

A few weeks ago, my daughter 👋 who is one of my loyal readers 🥰 suggested that I write about La Malinche. La Malinche is popularly known as Mexico’s traitor and blamed for its conquest by the Spanish, which again, is impossible because there was no Mexico, or Spain for that matter. If anything, she should be blamed for the conquest of the Mexica and Tenochtitlan. Still, even that would be questionable considering that the Aztec Empire had been conquering surrounding cities for over 100 years, including La Malinche’s ancestors’ cities, and their people had been growing tired of their rule.

Malintzin, in an engraving dated 1886, Source: Wikipedia

I’ll stop calling her La Malinche now and call her Doña Marina, as the Spanish named/baptized her. I’ll explain why I am choosing to call her this. First, because nobody knows what her birth name was. When she was given to Hernan Cortes and his men, she was given as a peace offering by the Tabascans in the Yucatec Mayan Peninsula who had themselves taken her captive and enslaved her. Her name might have changed throughout this time too, but no one knows. Some sources say that her birth name was Malinali, meaning grass, and was the reason the Spanish gave her the similar-sounding name of Marina. However, according to Townsend, the Spanish were not in the habit of taking the time to learn enough about slaves in order to give them their names. Moreover, she explains that being born under the sign of grass was considered unlucky and therefore it was unlikely that she had been named Malinali, especially given the fact that she was born the daughter of a chief.

When she was handed over to the Spanish, they did what was their custom, baptize her and give her a name they could pronounce: Marina. Later, because of her knack for learning languages and becoming a translator for them, the Cortes and his men began to call her doña Marina, which is akin to being called Mrs. Marina, as a sign of respect and recognition. The book I am reading, Malintzin’s Choices by Camilla Townsend, refers to her as Malintzin (hence the title), as she was called by the Mexicas (Aztecs) in Nahuatl. In Nahuatl, they did not have the R sound which resulted in them calling her Malina instead of Marina. Upon gaining recognition as a translator, they added the -tzin at the end of her name, as a sign of respect, and she became Malintzin.

The epithet “La Malinche” came into Mexican popular culture through the 1826 anonymous novel, Xiconténcatl, after New Spain broke away from the Spanish crown and became Mexico. During this time, as Townsend states, “any friend of the Spaniards came to be seen as a dastardly foe,” even though many had, or were of, Spanish descent. Before this, there was almost no mention of her. In Xiconténcatl, doña Marina was made to be seen as a traitor who seduced Cortes and betrayed her people, and thus she came to be the ill-reputed “La Malinche” in many books thereafter. I would argue though, that in current times, being a malinche can be translated to mean a badass. Nevertheless, it is a nickname, not a name, and I will not call her that.

So, because I am now a Spanish speaker myself, as I’m sure some people reading this newsletter are, here I will call her doña Marina as is her first known name with the title she earned through her intelligence and her knack for language: first a native Nahuatl speaker, then a Maya Zoque speaker, like her Mayan slave owners, and finally Spanish, like the Spanish conquistadors.

Doña Marina was born around 1500 in a small state belonging to Coatzacoalcos (currently part of the southern Mexican state of Veracruz) which was part of the Aztec Empire. Between the ages of 8 and 19, approximately, she was traded more than once between different groups, ultimately arriving in the Yucatec Maya Peninsula before her 20th year, when she would be given as a peace offering to Cortes and his soldiers by the Tabascans.

What I am enjoying about this book is that the writer is not intending to write her autobiography but rather provides a detailed description of the time in which she was born which gives us some context to the choices she made in her life. I’ll leave you with Townsend’s description of her birthplace which reminds me of my grandmothers’ homes, except they were not the daughters of a noblemen.

Her home would have been like all homes–with cool, dark stone or earthen rooms on three or four sides of a courtyard–yet more elegant than some because the male head of household was almost certainly a nobleman, or pilli…Depending on how grand her father was, the basic architectural pattern was repeated once or even several times over within one complex, with one central courtyard and its associated rooms being the finest and most ornately decorated. In the middle of the smoky room in which Malintzin and her mother and full siblings slept stood the hearth, with the requisite grinding stone for corn, griddle for tortillas, and cooking pots for stews. At the sides of the room lay reed mats and blankets for the night and boxes and baskets to hold spinning and weaving supplies, clothes, toys, and the inhabitants' other possessions. Just outside the door that opened onto the courtyard and let in the light, there always stood a broom, used every morning in the sacred act of beating back chaos and disorder.