La Malinche – Biography of La Malinche

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The Malinche, also known as Doña Marina, Malintzin, Malinal and Malinulli, was a woman who played an important role in the Spanish conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica. Acting as a slave, confidant, and lover, she successfully guided Hernán Cortés in and out of many battles. Probably due to the fact that she was a slave who rose to a leadership position, for many Mexicans, she is seen as a mythical being.

The Malinche He was born around the year 1502 in the town of Painalla in the province of Coatzacualco, in the extreme north of the base of the Yucatan peninsula. She was the daughter of a great cacique and, therefore, of high social position; In his younger years, his father died and his mother remarried and had a son.

Determining that her new son was the heir to her first husband, the mother of Malinche He sold her as a slave overnight in order to avoid her discovery. In order to explain the disappearance of her daughter, her mother took the body of the son of a slave who had died and buried him saying it was her own daughter. Malinche She ended up in the possession of a Tabasco chieftain and it was obvious to everyone that she was no ordinary slave. He displayed qualities of an educated person and carried himself with great confidence that inspired the respect of others.

Malinche it became the possession of Cortés after the first significant victory for the Spanish in the town of Tabasco. She, along with twenty other slave women, was sent to Cortés by the Tabasco chieftains to be Spanish cooks. When the women were taken to the Spanish fields, Cortés distributed them among his officers. Malinche it was given for the first time to Alonso Hernández Puerto Carrero. Cortés then appointed Puertocarrero his messenger to Carlos V of Spain and as soon as he left the camp, Cortés took Malinche for himself.

Malinche She turned out to be more than a slave to Cortes. Due to her being well-educated as a child and the fact that she moved around often during her time in slavery, the young woman was able to develop a knack for languages. She learned Spanish in a matter of weeks, but her main value to Cortés was that she had learned Nahuatl, the language used throughout the Aztec north. Malinche It turned out to be one of Cortés’s greatest assets. Not only because of her great service as a translator, but because of her knowledge of the Mexican language, customs, and even designs, she was often able to get Spaniards out of embarrassing and dangerous situations. Malinche came to be seen by the Spanish as a great warrior princess and they baptized her by giving her the name of Doña Marina, as a sign of respect.

Doña Marina served Cortés as a translator, warrior, and confidant. She was the key to Cortés’s success in convincing other Indian nations to join them in his campaign of destruction of the great Aztec nation. Not only Malinche He translated his words for the people, but fought alongside them and used his knowledge of customs to show them that following the Spanish was the correct path. Along with instructions to seize all the lands, the Spanish came to America with the idea of ​​spreading Christianity. Cortés decided that it was necessary to stop the practice of human sacrifice and for this he decided that he needed to destroy the temples in which they were carried out. In the hands of The Malinche the task of convincing the indigenous allies fell that such unholy destruction was a good idea. Already fearful of the wrath of the Aztecs, now the Indians were also afraid of their gods. Through the help of MalincheCortés was able to convince the allied Indians that the Spanish intention to conquer the Aztecs was the correct one.

In 1519, Cortés and MalincheTogether with the allied tribes, they reached Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs. There he invited the Aztec leader, Moctezuma to his camp and captured him. Malinche He first spoke to him and then tried to convince him to renounce all his forces, giving all his wealth and his kingdom to the Spanish. To Cortés’s dismay, Moctezuma was assassinated by his own people and lost his only hope of convincing him to surrender peacefully. Because of this, the Spanish were expelled from the city, and in the process, they lost many men. As a result of their retirement, Spanish romantics have portrayed another side of their Mrs. Marina. The woman of “the sad night“, the nurse of defeated soldiers, the consolation of Cortés, drying the tears that stained his wrinkled face. The Malinche It turned out to be more than just a slave to Hernán Cortés. She was, in many ways, the key reason for conquering one of the most powerful nations in America.

Malinche and Cortés eventually gave birth to a son named Martín. Cortés took her and her son Martin on a trip to Honduras, which brought her back to her hometown. There he was reunited with his mother and half brother and forgave them for everything they had done. Malinche she eventually married a man named Juan Jaramillo in a small town called Ostotipec. Cortes granted him many parcels of land, one of which belonged to Moctezuma. Apparently Malinche She died of smallpox due to an epidemic that occurred in 1528 or 1529. It is said that her progeny line extended at least until the death of a nine-year-old boy, Fernando Gómez de Orosco y Figueroa, who was born in Tlzapan in 1930.

The Malinche, the mother of the Conquest, was one of the key factors in the Spanish success over the Mesoamerican peoples. Without their help and diplomatic skills, Cortés could never have achieved his goal of conquering the New World. Despite this fact, she remains a woman of historical contradictions. In many cases, she is shown as the traitor, but in others she is seen as “the eve of Mexico” because she is seen as the mother of the mestizos. She witnessed the end of an old civilization and the rise of a new one and became a symbolic mother for the new ethnic group living in Mexico today. She remains a controversial figure for the Mexican people and probably always will be.