Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Diálogos Series)

American Historical Review: Can anything new be said about Malintzin (Doña Marina, La Malinche), Hernán Cortés's Nahuatl-speaking interpreter during the conquest of the Aztecs? Ethnohistorical research has already recovered the outlines of the remarkable woman who lies beneath popular images of traitor, whore, victim, & mother of the mestizo Mexican nation, & has reevaluated conquest history from indigenous points of view. Yet Camilla Townsend quickly convinced this reader that the tracesof the “real” Malintzin merit a book-length elaboration, & she sets these traces into an extensively researched & delightfully absorbing story. Given the limited & often contradictory evidence, it is more a book about Malintzin's “contexts” than a conventional biography, & Townsend dabbles in the “what would she have felt?” speculations that bedevil biographers of poorly documented subjects. But although her conjectures sometimes cross into the fanciful, they are never jarring or absurd, & she often presents multiple possible scenarios.

Malintzin's childhood name is unknown; “Malintzin” is a Nahuatl adaptation of the Spanish baptismal name, Marina, assigned to her after the Mayas of Putunchan gave her & 19 other girls to Cortés & his party as a peacemaking gesture. In Putunchan Malintzin was a slave, having been sold away from her Nahuatl-speaking home, where she may have been the daughter of a minor nobleman's concubine. Cortés gave this pretty teenager to a high-ranking compatriot, Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero. She began to exercise the “choices” of the book's title when the Castilians first encountered Nahuatl-speaking emissaries of the Mexica emperor Motecuhzoma, with whom Jerónimo de Aguilar, the Mayan-speaking shipwreck survivor Cortés had picked up in Yucatán, could not communicate. Malintzin could, & did, translating their words into Mayan for Aguilar. Freed from Puertocarrero's bed, & quickly mastering Castilian, she became th