What Else Was She Going to Do?

In response to this week’s prompt, I do not believe that Malintzin was a traitor.  In order to be a traitor, she would have had to possess the ability to freely choose to go to the Spanish side.  I can understand the argument that perhaps she should have gone down in a blaze of martyrdom and embodied in her final moments the pride of her people.  However, more than anything else, Malintzin was realistic about her situation, a point that Townsend gets at time and time again.  The fact of the matter was that more Spanish would come to the New World, even if the indigenous could manage to improbably defeat Cortes’s crew.  Furthermore, Cortes was going to have his words interpreted one way or another.  By stepping up to fill this role, Malintzin put herself in a position from which she could help the indigenous far more than she could have at any other point in her life.  By translating for Cortes, she could make it clear that more Spanish would come and that the indigenous should lay down their arms.  In doing so, it is probable that she saved many indigenous lives.  However, had she chosen to die rather than to translate, or chosen to remain silent instead of offering her services when the opportunity first appeared, she would have helped no one.  Had she reveled in her newfound power and privilege with no concern for the indigenous people, perhaps then one could consider her a traitor, but this was not the case.  Malintzin was in a very difficult situation and simply tried to make the best of it.