by Lucy E. Zahnle

Created on: September 05, 2009

After God, we owe this conquest of New Spain to Dona Marina!

Hernan Cortez, in a letter preserved in the Spanish Archives

After five hundred years, one Aztec woman's name still has the power to stir emotion and generate debate, especially among Hispanic peoples, and the amazing thing is that no one really knows what that woman's name was! Her birth name has been lost in obscurity, replaced with others like Malintzin, Malinal, Malinali, Dona Marina, and, most notably, La Malinche. Her story is shrouded. Most statements about her life begin with, 'It is believed' or 'According to historians', but despite the confusion, she lives on in history, legend, and folklore, reviled as a traitor, revered as a heroic woman, and even feared as a ghost.

Bernal Diaz of Castillo, writing some fifty years after Hernan Cortez's 1521 conquest of Mexico ended, provides most of what we know about La Malinche in his book, Verdadera Historia de la Conquista de Nueva Espana (True History of the Conquest of New Spain). She was born some time between 1500 and 1505 in the town of Paynalla to noble Aztec parents. Her father died when she was around nine years old and her mother remarried. After a son was born to them, her mother and stepfather decided to be rid of her so that the son would receive her inheritance. Malinche was sold or given away into slavery, her parents explaining her disappearance by producing a dead slave girl's body and claiming it was La Malinche.

A native Nahuatl speaker, Malinche was traded many times, learning other languages and dialects in her travels. She eventually ended up in Tabasco. In 1519, when Malinche was about fourteen years old, Cortez attacked the town, scoring his first significant victory in the Conquest of Mexico. As a propitiatory gesture, the townspeople offered him gifts; amongst them, Malinche and nineteen other young women, chosen for their beauty, to act as cooks and washerwomen.

Cortez baptized all the women and Malinche was christened Marina. Cortez assigned a woman to each of his captains, but when Malinche's captain was sent back to Spain with messages, Cortez took Malinche as his servant. Diaz writes that Malinche was a 'very exceptional woman,' good-looking and intelligent and without embarrassment' An educated, refined woman, she came to be respected among the Spanish as Dona Marina.

As Cortez moved farther into Aztec territories, Dona Marina's education served him well. His interpreter, Jernimo Aguilar, spoke Spanish

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