Kudos to Camilla Townsend

I am not necessarily going to answer the prompt, but I think many people have done a really thoughtful job so far. However, what I will say is I really like that Camilla Townsend took on this project. It is becoming more common, thankfully, for scholars to take on difficult project about people or events that do not have a lot of source material and are therefore challenging to really put together a stable argument with conclusive evidence. Her attempt at trying to possibly show how Malintzin made the best of a bad situation by looking at the context of the time through gender, class, indigenous culture and what she can find about her in sources is pretty good I think. She mainly used ethnographic evidence to make her claims because other materials just do not seem to really exist. There may be some times where she does play the victim card a little strongly, but I do not think she ever means to indicate that Malintzin was weak or had no choice. Everyone has a choice. Of course her choice was really only one of life or death essentially and in that way she is sort of seen as a victim. The first chapter really explored the context of Malintzin’s childhood and the gendered categories that forced women to act a certain way. Because of her gender and class, as she did become a slave, victimized her from the start. Nonetheless, the journey that Townsend takes us on through the life of Malintzin helps us see how this woman was able to change her own fate and the fate of many others even though she was never able to gain full power over herself.