In 1990 Camilla Townsend, then a graduate student of history at Rutgers–New Brunswick, was introduced to a kindred soul of sorts in Malintzin, the indigenous slave who accompanied Hernando Cortes across Mexico from 1519 to 1521.
Fluent in English, Spanish, and French herself, Townsend was fascinated by the woman who used her own talent with languages to translate and negotiate with her native people on Cortes’s behalf, enabling the Spanish to overtake her homeland. Malintzin eventually became the subject of Townsend’s book, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, published last December by the University of New Mexico Press.
Townsend returned to Rutgers in September 2006 as associate professor of history. But first she finished graduate school, joined the history faculty at Colgate University, and published her doctoral dissertation, “Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America” (University of Texas Press, 2000). She wrote and published a second book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (Hill & Wang, 2004), about Malintzin’s indigenous “sister” who played a similar role as cultural ambassador to North America’s Captain John Smith a century later.
Throughout those years, she remained drawn to Malintzin, who is famous (and infamous) in Mexico but little known in the United States. Townsend studied Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec language, and commenced her third book, a biography of this complicated woman. This was not an easy task. As intelligent as Malintzin was, she never learned to write and left no first-person accounts of her adventures. It was not until the 1550s, more than 20 years after Malintzin’s death in 1529, that native people in Mexico began acquiring the Roman alphabet and, with tutoring from Franciscan friars, wrote accounts in Spanish of their preconquest lives.
Townsend consulted these documents, as other scholars have, for any light they could shed on the native experience in Malintzin’s time. But they were limited by being in Spanish, still not Malintzin’s native tongue. Townsend’s biography is significantly strengthened by her ability to read Nahuatl documents, albeit ones produced after Malintzin’s death, and mine them for clues of what Indians thought of their situation around the time of the conquest.
“What I have tried to write, then, is a book about contexts,” Townsend writes in the introduction of Malintzin’s Choices. “Despite the focus on Malintzin, it is more than the story of one woman’s life; it is an exploration of indigenous experience in her era.”
Key to understanding Malintzin is, as a Nahua child, she was given or sold by her own people as a slave to a conquering tribe, the Mayans. When she was in her late teens Malintzin was again given away, this time to the invading Spaniards as a peace offering. Eventually she became Cortes’s mistress and bore him a son, thus securing for herself and for him, a place among Europeans in the New World.
Townsend suggests that, once in the hands of the Spanish, Malintzin bore no loyalty to her Mayan captors or even, perhaps, to her own Nahua people. Those who had twice delivered her to slavery may have understood her choice to help Cortes as the only way to save her own life and forge a legacy for her children. Townsend posits that Malintzin’s ability to negotiate sensitive issues across multiple languages and dialects enabled her to assist the invaders while maintaining the trust of her own people.
Mexican popular culture has portrayed Malintzin variously as a goddess (there is evidence that she sometimes was understood to be the Virgin Mary), as a traitor and temptress, and as a victim of the Spanish and her own (male) people. Ultimately, she was a resourceful survivor, and Townsend asserts she made choices that any politically astute but powerless woman would have made in her time and place.
“She knew she was surviving – as well as she could – the most ordinary of lives,” Townsend writes. “Malintzin is compelling to me because she was placed in an unbearable situation and more than survived. She kept her dignity intact. She made a place for her children. It is a story about the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.”