Response to Townsend / Malintzin's Choices

  Before this semester, I must admit I didn't know the name Malintzin, nor the importance of the name in history.  William Prescott wrote an account of Malintzin, and mentioned her more than a few times in Conquest, portraying her as "Marina" - a useful interpreter and concubine to Cortes.  Prescott even mentioned her son by Cortes - Don Martin Cortes, although not really her daughter Maria (by Jaramillo), and all of this of course written from the Euro-centric point of view.  Since reading Camilla Townsend's Malintzin's Choices, I better understand the whole extent of the story of Malintzin, as before I had not realized the impact of her important contribution, nor had I imagined the possibilities of the choices she would have had to have made.  In Townsend's interpretation, we realize the critical role of language as not only a mechanism to relate opposing sides to one another, but also language as a way to create a unique existence for Malintzin - a way for her to exercise agency is a very rare way for any woman of her era, let alone a slave turned translator - an invaluable asset to Cortes an the Spanish.  Townsend's work certainly isn't a typical biography, and it feels to me a lot like a micro-history, using the life experience of Malintzin as a lens to look at indigenous peoples in Mexico in the 16th century.  In her review of the book, Louise M. Burkhart points out that there is a certain risk inherent in writing about Marintzin and "what would she have felt?".  This is understandable, and Thompson acknowledges "the woman left us no diaries or letters, not a single page." But what I believe what we have in Malintzin's Choices is a power study in context based history (perhaps micro-history) in which we can look at and interpret the situations in which Malintzin was involved and surmise how she must have made certain decisions.  Thompson points to ethnographic evidence of both the Nahuas and the Spaniards as key to interpreting Malintzin and the "kinds of thoughts she might have entertained."  I really found the chapters on both of her children quite compelling, as a testament to the power Malintzin had not only to perpetuate herself, but to put her children forth into the world as people who "won places for themselves in the world of conquerors" as their mother had done before them.  One can imagine that Malintzin, like a lot of parents since time began, wanted a good life for her children - it seems the exercise of her agency was a gift she sought to bequeath to her children.