La Malinche: The Translator Who Shaped the Aztec Conquest

[00:00:06]When Hernan Cortes and his Spanish conquistadors  conquered the Aztec Empire of North America   between 1519 and 1521 they were aided  greatly by a native woman. Malinalli,   who became known as Malintzin or La Malinche,  acted as a translator, advisor and intermediary   for the Spanish. Her name has become a byword  for duplicity and betrayal of one’s own people.   But was she an embodiment of treachery  or a victim of her circumstances?

[00:00:45]La Malinche was born as Malinalli around  the year 1500 amongst the Nahua people of   the Yucatan Peninsula in what is now southern  Mexico and Guatemala. She grew up in the border   region between the ancient Mayan Empire and the  newer, expansionist and aggressive Aztec Empire,   the capital of which lay much further north at  Tenochtitlan, the site of present-day Mexico City.

[00:01:11]We know little of her early childhood. But we do  know that when she was eight or nine years old   Malinalli was enslaved. It is unclear if she  was kidnapped during a raid by a war party,   or if she was sold by her family. Slavery was  very common in the Central American region   in the pre-colonial period and it might well be  that her family traded her to some Mayan peoples   further to the east. This is the version of events  which was presented by Bernal Diaz de Castillo,   a Spanish soldier, who accompanied Hernan  Cortes when he conquered Mexico and who later   wrote a history of these events entitled The True  History of the Conquest of New Spain in the 1560s.

[00:01:55]Whatever the circumstances  of how she became enslaved,   we do know that Malinalli’s captivity led  to a very important development. Until this   point in her life she had spoken the  Nahua language of the Aztec people.   Now she found herself living amongst the Mayan  people who spoke Yucatec Maya. As a consequence   Malinalli became bilingual. This would have  a major significance for her later story.

[00:02:24]Other specifics of Malinalli’s life as a slave  amongst the Mayan people of the Yucatan Peninsula   in the years ahead are few and far between. She  may have been traded several times and lived in   different places. What we do know is that she was  still a slave, one entering her early adult years,   in 1518 when the first Spanish explorers, sailing  out of the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean,   landed on the Yucatan Peninsula and made  contact with the natives of Central America.

[00:02:56]This first contact quickly led to more  sustained intervention in the region.   The following year, in 1519, a Spanish military  commander named Hernan Cortes led an expedition   from the Spanish colony on the island of Cuba to  the Yucatan Peninsula. When he arrived at the city   of Pontonchan in the Mayan’s territory the city  authorities, hoping to appease the Europeans,   gave Cortes twenty slaves as a gift. One of  these women was none other than Malinalli.

[00:03:30]At first Malinalli was treated no differently  than the other slaves. They were baptized as   Christians and given European names. Cortes then  gave Malinalli to one of his more senior followers   and perhaps thought little more about  her. But then a discovery was made.

[00:03:48]It was learned that in addition to being able  to speak the local Yucatec Maya language of the   Mayans, Malinalli was also able to speak the  Nahua language of the Aztecs further to the   north and west. Cortes had come to Central America  determined to conquer the Aztecs, having heard of   the riches of their empire from the Spanish who  had landed in Central America the previous year.

[00:04:13]As such it was determined that Malinalli could  be used as an interpreter for the Spanish.   Though she could not speak Spanish, a  Spanish priest in Cortes’s company had   quickly begun to learn some Yucatec Maya based on  the information gleaned from the 1518 expedition.   Thus, by pairing the priest and Malinalli together  Cortes would be able to communicate with the Nahua   speaking peoples they would encounter as they  moved further inland towards Tenochtitlan.

[00:04:45]As such he recovered Malinalli from the Spaniard  to whom she had been given. Henceforth she would   be Cortes’s constant companion in Central America  and she is always depicted as being in close   proximity to him in any paintings or drawings  made of the events which subsequently took place.

[00:05:06]Having secured the coast of the Yucatan  Peninsula, Cortes and his followers moved   inland in the months that followed. As they did  they made war on several Nahua towns and villages,   but others they negotiated with. Malinalli was  critical in these negotiations. The Spanish were   relatively few in number in 1519. If Cortes  and his men were to conquer Tenochtitlan   they would need allies from amongst the other  Nahua-speaking people of the Mexico region.

[00:05:37]They soon acquired these allies from the  Tlaxcalans and Texcocan people of the area   who were embittered about  Aztec rule in Central America,   particularly with having to provide human  tributes to the Aztecs who were killed   as sacrifices during religious festivals at  Tenochtitlan. Using Malinalli as an interpreter   Cortes was able to win over these people  to the Spanish cause against the Aztecs.

[00:06:05]It is also at this time that  Malinalli became known as Malintzin,   a Nahua rendering of her name. It  added a royal honorific to her name,   and the natives they encountered assumed she was  a noble, well she had a significant prominence   within Cortes’s entourage. The Spanish  then Hispanicised this name as Malinche   and added La before it to call her ‘Lady’,  such was the esteem the Spanish held her in.

[00:06:35]Eventually the Spanish expedition made its way to  Tenochtitlan in November 1519. There they met with   the Aztec emperor, Montezuma II, who spoke with  Cortes, with La Malinche acting as an interpreter.   Montezuma welcomed them into the city and agreed  to give them living quarters in a central part   of Tenochtitlan. Popular beliefs that  the Aztecs worshipped the Spaniards   as some sort of white gods with metal armour  and guns have been overstated. Certainly their   technological superiority would have impressed  the Aztecs, but Montezuma was not overawed.   It is more likely that he wanted to trade with  the Spanish and begin acquiring their weapons.

[00:07:24]One legend states that upon hearing  Cortés' description Montezuma said "He   has appeared! He has come back! He will come  here to the place of his throne and canopy,   for that is what he said he  would do when he departed."  According to some, the Spaniards  were long-lost Aztec deities,   and due to a series of coincidences, some claim  that Montezuma even believed that perhaps Cortés   was the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, who had promised  to return one day to reclaim his kingdom.  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent was considered  a god of creation who had been expelled and   vanished across the sea eastwards, near Veracruz,  where Cortés had landed. Also, legend had it   that Quetzalcoatl was white-skinned, bearded and  opposed to human sacrifice just like Cortés. Yet,   the most unsettling coincidence was that the  year in which Quetzalcoatl was said to return   to bring peace to the Aztec Empire was  1519, the same year that Cortés arrived.

[00:08:33]The Spanish remained at Tenochtitlan for  over half a year as the guests of the Aztecs.   But relations were increasingly tense, not  least owing to the Spanish condemnation   of some of the religious and  social practices of the Aztecs.   Things boiled over in the early summer of  1520 when word reached Cortes that some of his   troops back on the coast had been attacked.  Perhaps the Aztecs had been responsible?

[00:09:00]These events culminated in the  night of the 30th of June 1520,   which has become known as La Noche Triste, the Sad  Night. Some stories have it that the Aztec people,   tired of Montezuma’s placating of the  Spaniards attacked the emperor and   stoned him to death. However, it is also  possible that Cortes killed the emperor.   Whatever the exact circumstances, the  atmosphere in Tenochtitlan now became hostile.

[00:09:30]The Aztecs attacked the Spanish and throughout  the course of the night the Spaniards had to   fight their way out of city, losing many of  their men and followers along the way. Again   La Malinche may have been pivotal to these  events, having been able to bring word to Cortes   that the Aztecs were preparing  to attack the Spaniards.

[00:09:50]Following the events of La Noche Triste  the Spaniards entered into an all-out war   with the Aztecs. Cortes and his followers  spent months gathering their Nahua allies   around Central America before returning  to Tenochtitlan the following year.   When they did they returned to an Aztec city which  was severely weakened from a smallpox pandemic   which had been unleashed in  the city by the Spaniards.

[00:10:15]The Aztecs had no immunity  to this European disease   and it decimated the population of Tenochtitlan.  Consequently in the summer of 1521 Cortes   and his native allies were able to conquer  Tenochtitlan, bringing to an end the Aztec Empire.

[00:10:31]In the years that followed the Spanish Empire  expanded to control all of Central America.   La Malinche had been central to the conquest  of her own people. Cortes once claimed that   next to God no one was more critical in  his success in conquering Mexico than her.

[00:10:50]Yet, her story does not end there. Once  the conquest of the Aztecs was complete   she continued to live with Cortes for  some time. In 1522 she bore him a son   named Martin. For this reason she has become  known as ‘the mother of the mestizo race’,   the mestizos being the mixed-race  people who emerged in Latin America   in the decades that followed through the  intermarriage of the natives and the Spanish.

[00:11:17]However La Malinche was not to marry Cortes.  He was already married and when his wife   arrived to Mexico in 1524 he decided La  Malinche needed to leave his household.   Accordingly that year she married Juan Jaramillo,  one of Cortes’s captains. This union made La   Malinche a free Spanish noblewoman. She bore  Jaramillo a daughter in 1526. Her children would   eventually become part of the Mexican and Spanish  nobility, but she would never live to see this.   In 1529 La Malinche, like so many of  the other natives of Central America,   fell prey to smallpox. She was perhaps  about 29 years of age at the time.

[00:12:06]There is great debate about how  La Malinche should be remembered.   Her name itself has become a byword for treachery.  In Central America and in Mexico in particular   Malinchista refers to a disloyal compatriot.  After all this was a woman who helped the   Spanish conquer and destroy the  civilization of her own homeland.

[00:12:29]And yet maybe she is not to be held responsible  for the events which she was involved in,   but was a victim of circumstances. After all,  she first became involved with the Spanish as   a result of having been enslaved as a child. Her  role in acting as a translator wasn’t something   which she planned and she may well have been  forced to do so once Cortes and his followers   learned that she could be of use to them in  communicating with the Nahua-speaking people.

[00:12:58]In any event, even if she was a willing  ally of Cortes and his Spanish conquistadors   perhaps we shouldn’t judge her  too harshly for this. After all,   all she was doing was aiding somebody  against a society which had enslaved her   in the first place. We may never know what  she really thought of her circumstances,   but there is no denying that La Malinche was a  critical figure in the destruction of the Aztec   Empire and the transformation of Central  America during the sixteenth century.

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