La Malinche, or Malintzin, was the primary interpreter in the retinue of Hernán Cortés during his conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century and has become one of the most divisive women in Mexican history. Though she was called Malintzin by the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Aztec Empire, she was known as Doña Marina or Malinche to the Spanish conquistadors, and modern scholars typically refer to her by the latter. She was instrumental to the success of the Spanish conquest and is regarded at once a traitor to her people, a symbol of Indigenous responses to colonial power, and an exemplar of survival and resilience.

Born in Coatazacoalcos near modern-day Veracruz, Malintzin was the daughter of a noble father and a low-ranking mother and was sold into slavery at a young age. Taken from her home and kin, she was brought to the Mayan coastal town of Xicallanco and traded for either beans or bolts of cloth, the currency that ruled in the trading port at that time. From there, the young, enslaved girl was taken to Potonchan near the mouth of the Tabasco River, where she would live among the powerful and wealthy Chontal Maya. Years later, when the Chontal Maya sustained devastating and unprecedented losses in skirmishes with the newly arrived expedition of Spanish conquistadors, she was one in a group of 20 young women whom the Chontal Maya traded to the Spanish, led by Hernán Cortés, in exchange for peace.

Though some sources mention the name "Malinalli" for this young girl, this might be an incorrect attribution. In her book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Camilla Townsend states that it is unclear how she would have been addressed before or during her enslavement by the Maya. Townsend argues that it was at this point in her story, when she was given to the Spanish by the Chontal Maya, that her name – or at least the names by which she would become known – would enter the historical record. In the hands of the Spanish, she was christened "Marina." According to Townsend, "Her captors did not ask what her former name had been, nor did she tell them" (Townsend 2019, 90).

The name Marina offers context for the rest of the names by which this woman is now known. The Indigenous peoples, whose language did not include an "r" sound, heard the name "Marina" and pronounced it as "Malina," and because they held her in high regard, added the honorific "tzin" to the end of the name, making it "Malintzin," or sometimes "Malintze." When the Spanish, whose native tongue did not include a "tz" sound, heard the Nahuatl "Malintzin", she became alternatively known as "Malinche" or "La Malinche."

Enslaved and traded from Indigenous masters to the Spanish, "Marina" was given by Cortés to Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero, one of the higher-ranking men in the expedition, who was allowed to do with this enslaved young woman as he wished. This would have been the general modus operandi of the conquistadors, with the women given to them by Indigenous groups as gifts to signify peace. From there, Marina would have disappeared into obscurity if not for the Spaniards' choice to leave the lands of the Maya and journey west into the territory of Motecuhzoma II (reign 1502 to 1520, commonly known as Montezuma or Moctezuma), ruler of the Aztec Empire.

Among the Maya, Cortés had secured a man named Jerónimo de Aguilar, who, he was confident, would be able to act as interpreter among the Indigenous populations of Mesoamerica. Aguilar had been shipwrecked eight years prior and had been enslaved by the Yucatec Maya, living among them and learning their language. This allowed him to translate for Cortés' expedition during their communication with the Chontal Maya in Potonchan. However, when they entered the Nahuatl-speaking territories of the Aztecs, Aguilar was unfamiliar with the language and was no longer able to serve as translator.

Surprisingly, in this moment, the woman called Marina became crucial to the success of Cortés' expedition. While we cannot be sure how – whether it was Marina's own initiative or the inducement of her captors – the Spanish discovered that she was fluent in Nahuatl and could translate what was being said into Chontal Maya, which Aguilar could then translate into Spanish. In the face of this realization, Cortés is said to have offered Marina "more than her liberty" if she helped him find and speak to Montezuma. Townsend writes, "Within days, the Spaniards were calling her ‘doña Marina,' a title reserved for highborn ladies in Europe" (Townsend 2019, 93). In the weeks and months to come, Marina herself learned enough Spanish to remove the need for Aguilar's role in the translation chain, making her an essential part of the Spaniards' plans.

The prominence of her role is reflected in two extant sources, Cortés' own letters to the king of Spain, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (reigned 1519 to 1556), and Bernal Díaz del Castillo's The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Díaz del Castillo wrote, "this was the great beginning of our conquests…I have made a point of telling this story because without Doña Marina, we could not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico" (Carrasco 2014, 149).

While Díaz del Castillo reflected on her value writing in hindsight, Cortés, writing consistently to the king during the time of the conquest, was extremely hesitant to attribute credit to her. Townsend writes, "What Cortés did not want others to realize was that if Malintzin hadn't been there, they could not have succeeded" (Townsend 2019, 99). Furthermore, Malintzin seems to have been uniquely able to convey the Spaniard's message to the Indigenous peoples because, in addition to her fluency with Chontal Mayan, Nahuatl, and eventually Spanish, she was able to speak in the higher register of nobility, which had its own grammar. She also demonstrated a nuanced understanding of the complex political and social situations in which she had to act as interpreter. For example, Malintzin helped Cortés secure an alliance with the rulers of Tlaxcala that would ultimately be essential to his victory over the Aztecs in their capital city of Tenochtitlan, presenting herself to the Indigenous people as an authoritative and trustworthy presence. Her finesse in navigating relationships with and gathering information from local peoples also allowed Cortés' forces to avoid ambush by the people of Cholula en route to Tenochtitlan, among other such situations that required an attentive translator.

In the months and years to come, as Cortés and the Spanish brought technology, strategy, and, inadvertently, smallpox to bear against the might of the Aztec Empire, Malintzin continued to speak for and advise the newcomers. Her counsel to the Spanish favored caution, discretion, and peaceful communication with Indigenous groups as the leaders of Mesoamerica chose sides in a conflict between the powerful precedent of the Aztec and the advent of the outsiders.

After the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Malintzin was the primary means of conveying Spanish demands for tribute to the people of the areas within and surrounding the former Aztec Empire, who were now effectively vassals of the Spanish crown but governed, for a time at least, by Cortés himself. In mid-1524, she was still the primary means of negotiation between the Spanish and the Indigenous population. Townsend paints us a picture of Malintzin in her prime:

She was translating in multiple venues, high and low, and was committed to training other translators. She ran her own household, earning money to maintain herself, her son, and her staff through small business ventures that her language skills and connections rendered it possible for her to operate. She wore an elaborately embroidered huipilli, or blouse, over a fine skirt, as well as sandals – unlike other women, who mostly went barefoot. All of this signaled her status, but she never grew overbearing or boastful. Nor did she ever choose to switch to Spanish dress…Everyone who had dealings with her liked her.

(139)

Even Cortés mentioned how dedicated she was to the Spanish effort in colonizing Mexico in those early years and expressed some of his own, if sparing, gratitude. Despite her complicity with Spanish colonization efforts and deliberate destruction of Mesoamerican culture and religion, Malinztin was not simply letting her talents be used. Townsend tells us that "she bargained hard and astutely to secure protection for herself, her children, and her people in the best way she could," and in a subtle but clear victory, "Malintzin was assigned her natal village of Olutla as an encomienda. She would rule there, rather than a Spaniard." (Townsend, 140) Townsend makes it clear that the concession of her birthplace to her rule would have been something Malintzin had to advocate for, rather than the possibility of it having been given to her by Cortés out of his own generosity.

When Malintzin died around 1529, she was survived by two children. Her first child was a son fathered by Cortés and named Martín after Cortés' father. The expedition leader would eventually seek a papal bull to legitimize his son and take him, as a child, away from his mother to be raised in the court of the Spanish king. Malintzin's second child, a daughter named María, was fathered by Juan Jaramillo, a man she married around 1524. After her death, people remembered her as having been, as Townsend describes, "a cheerful, honorable, and extraordinarily competent person who had done her best to establish order in the nearly lawless early months " (139). Only Aguilar, whose role as translator she had usurped and who had ample reason to feel bitter and vindictive towards her, accused her of promiscuity after her death, a claim which no one else corroborated.

Accounts of Malintzin's life occasionally situate her relationship with Cortés as one of passionate love, devotion, or seduction. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Cortés and his men held an extraordinary amount of power over Malintzin and the other women given to them. To the general population of Indigenous peoples, they demonstrated a level of military technology and destructive potential in warfare that was entirely unprecedented in Mesoamerica. For the vulnerable population of women given to them as chattel, there is no reason to expect that the men in the expedition would not have used and abused them. For the Aztec and Maya, the offering of young women as gifts to an opposing power had been going on long before the arrival of the conquistadors and was intended, in part, to build kinship alliances and political connections between the different Mesoamerican groups who might share resources, lands, traditions, and bloodlines. If the Spanish were aware of this tradition through Aguilar or Malintzin translating for them, they showed little regard for the women through whom such cultural connections were meant to be forged.

Some of the men close to Cortés wrote that "he had no more conscience than a dog" (143) and that he had "violated multiple princesses during those early years" of the conquest (111). Furthermore, Townsend mentions that one of Montezuma's most highborn and respected daughters, Tecuichpotzin, fell pregnant almost immediately after having been transferred to Cortés' "care" in his residence years, after the destruction of her home, devastation of her people, and the murder of her father. When scholars reference the Spaniards keeping the most attractive of the captive young women for themselves, their implication should not be ignored.

Of all the women kept among the Spanish during the conquest, Malintzin would have been uniquely situated to witness and deeply understand the violent intentions of the Spaniards and their willingness to slaughter, use, or enslave Indigenous populations in pursuit of gold and power. There is no evidence to suggest that Malintzin loved or even liked Cortés or his men: They provided an avenue toward her freedom, and she took it.

Whatever liberty she was able to secure, however, came at the price of a complex legacy. Many people of Mexican descent consider Malintzin to have been a traitor to the Indigenous People of Mesoamerica. In some cases, she is objectified as a bodily representation of the denigration and devastation wrought by the coming of the Spanish to Mexico. Moreover, giving birth to Martín, in the eyes of some, situated her as the mother of the first formally recognized Mestizo, a term for a person of mixed Indigenous and European descent. Because Mestizo populations would struggle for rights under the Spanish crown in the decades after the conquest, her role as a sort of ancestral mother of a marginalized group infuses Malintzin's legacy with yet more complicated socio-political dynamics. For others still, her complicity in the Spanish cause, particularly the eradication of native culture, places her at odds with the proud and vibrant heritage of Mexico's Indigenous populations that still survives today. While these perspectives represent valid topics of debate, there is no evidence that the people of Malintzin's time thought of her this way, on either side of the conquest.

When the Spanish arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica, they were entering a land in which ethnic groups had been warring with their neighbors for centuries. The legendary history of the Aztecs' emergence from primordial Aztlan and eventual arrival at the divinely indicated seat of Tenochtitlan is fraught with examples of their violent conflict with their neighbors. Indeed, while Malintzin undoubtedly played a substantial role in the conquest, Cortés' success would have been utterly impossible without his allying with the Tlaxcalans and other Indigenous groups who had been warring with the empire for generations and likely loathed their would-be Aztec overlords. The Aztecs were not Malintzin's people; they were her people's enemies. "No one in her world could have imagined that she owed loyalty to Montezuma's people. While she lived, and for many years afterwards, no one expressed surprise at the course she chose" (Townsend 2019, 93 to 94).