In Mexico the name La Malinche has become synonymous with treachery and betrayal - it even forms one of the country’s most vicious insults. Some have described its owner, an indigenous slave who became the interpreter and mistress of conquistador Hernán Cortés, as the most hated woman in Mexico’s history.
But by helping the Spanish topple the Aztecs in the early sixteenth century was she really guilty of selling out her own people, or simply doing everything she could to survive? Might we credit her with limiting the lives lost in the bloody conflict – one she knew her people could not hope to win?
Bridget Kendall explores the little-known life, and hotly-contested legacy of one of the most controversial figures in Latin American history, and the role she played in the meeting of the Old World and the New.
We hear how La Malinche’s story, and motives, have been re-interpreted over the last 500 years, and learn why she remains important in discussions of national identity, gender, culture and politics in Mexico to this day.
Producer: Simon Tulett
Contributors: Camilla Townsend, distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, USA, and author of ‘Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico’; Dr Fernando Cervantes, a historian of early modern Spain and Spanish America at the University of Bristol, UK, and author of ‘Conquistadores: A New History’; Sandra Messinger Cypess, professor emerita of Latin American literature at the University of Maryland, USA, and author of ‘La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth’.
(Picture: La Malinche – a Mexican engraving, 1885, from the library of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. Credit: Prisma/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)