la malinche a symbol of emancipation for contemporary chicanas

7/27/2019 La Malinche a Symbol of Emancipation for Contemporary Chicanas

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27th

of April, 2007

Essay for SO453 - Gender and Post-Colonial Theory

Candidate Number - 32061

La Malinche: A symbol of emancipation for

contemporary chicanas?

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Introduction

After centuries as a scapegoat, in the 1970s la Malinche has

found a new political belonging in the Movimiento de las Chicanas,

the new voice of La Raza that speaks out, (Vidal, 1971) questioning

the political line of the Movimiento Chicano (Moya, 1997). The

central point of the political discussion opened by the Chicanas

concerns the space for the political demands of emancipation related

to gender discrimination, which is inexistent in the discourse and in

the practices of the Chicano Movement: “I’ve been told that the

Chicana’s struggle is not the same as the white women’s struggle.

I’ve been told that the problems are different and that… the

Chicana’s energies are needed in the barrio and that being feminist

and fighting for our rights as women and as human beings is anti-

Chicano and anti-male” (Vidal, 1971:12). Mirta Vidal records these

words by Elma Barrera in May 1971 in Houston where more than

600 Chicanas met to discuss a response to the Plan Atzlan (1969),

formal pillar of the Chicanos Movement.

La Malinche was blamed by the Mexican nationalist



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movement for the role she had as translator and concubine of Cortés

in the destruction of the pre-Columbian society. She was condemned

in the name of La Raza Mestiza and her name came to mean traitor

and violated mother of the Mexican Pueblo (Paz, 1985; Tafolla,

1978). Nonetheless, her ambivalence and her stigmas of shame have

permitted her name to survive the silence of official his tory, passing

from mouth to mouth in the popular stories. Today ‘Malinche’ is

still a vernacular word: it is the name that the drunks sing in the

cantinas, it is the insult that triggers quarrels in the streets, it is the

blame against every anonymous women in the widespread gender violence in Mexican domestic spaces. Malinche, Chingada, whore,

raped, screwed, corrupted, traitor (Tafolla, 1978, Nevarez 2004).

In the 1970s the Chicanas released La Malinche from her

traditional definition as scapegoat and she became a symbolic body,

a root paradigm (Cypress, 1992), a feminist prototype (Candelaria

1980): a collective name from where the Chicanas took back their

history and spoke out.

This essay will try to investigate the use of La Malinche by the

Chicanas. In order to do this, one needs to track the evolution of La

Malinche as a literary and historical figure through the centuries, an

evolution that constitutes and shapes the contradictions and symbols

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that La Malinche conveys. These ambivalences have been more and

more complex to manage in the context of North America where the

Chicanas took back the spectre of La Malinche as a discursive

weapon to reclaim autonomy from their complex political position

as migrants, coloured and women.

In order to deepen the analysis of the functional use of la

Malinche by the Chicanas feministas, it will be necessary to face

some questions: what is the ulterior space opened by the crisis

between Chicanos and Chicanas? What is the concrete tactical use of

la Malinche to inhabit this space? Which are the productive

contradictions of this figure?

Three names for one body

Malintzin and Doña Marina: two names that meet each other in 1519

during the Conquista of Mesoamerica ruled by Herman Cortés.

While moving from Yucatan towards Teotihuacán, the Spaniards

faced several populations: some were the allies, while others were

the subjected or the enemies of Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor who

fell in June 1520 defeated by the cruel determination of the

Conquistadores. Malintzin and Doña Marina represent the two faces

of the clash between these cultures, the violent conquest of

Mesoamerica, but the two names belong to the same woman.



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Malintzin is the name evoked in the History of Moctezuma. It

is the name of the first daughter of a cacique family of

Coatzacoalcos, in the South of contemporary Mexico, sold by her

mother at the age of nine in order to preserve the inherency of her

half-brother (Cypress, 1992). Malintzin travelled as a slave through

the different lands of Mesoamerica, learning Nauhatl, the lingua

franca of the complex Aztec empire. In March 1519 Tabascans gave

her to Cortes, together with other nineteen women, as a gift to

achieve an armistice with the Conquistadores (Diaz, 1963: 85

[1580]). After this last transaction, Malintzin was not only forced toabandon her people, but also to lose her name: in the History of

Cortés she was baptized with the name of Marina, to inscribe her

into the words and rituals of the Conquista (Candelaria 1980, Diaz

1963).

The names of Malintzin and Marina are written on the same

symbolic body. The first is the name of an object of exchange, sold

to preserve the patriarchal order of familial power. The second is the

name for a slave, imposed to affirm the irrevocable colonial

domination of the pre-Columbian cultures. (Harris 2004). But

'Malintzin' and 'Marina' also sketch an ambiguous continuity

between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés: her double body is one

territory - materially disputed but conceptually shared - on which

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both Moctezuma and Cortès enact their power. The experience of

'Marina' and 'Malintzin' is an example of how the traditional

feminine position has been one of the main battle fields of the

Conquista: the female subject conceived as an object to dominate,

excluded from any public space of power and from the sphere of

production, confined in the domestic and in the social reproduction

(Taylor, 2006).

The same body reclaims a third name, a name that resists the

objectification imposed on her by this History: La Malinche, the

tongue of the Spaniard (Candelaria, 1980). By breaking with the

official tradition, the character of La Malinche reclaims another

history. As a translator and stratega for Cortés, she played a central

role in the Conquista, explaining to the Spaniards the division

among the Mesoamerican peoples, dealing with, as well as for, the

indigenous peoples during the wars and being the principal

interpreter of Cortés during the negotiations with Moctezuma in

Teotihuacán in November 1519. And she was the mother of the first

Mestizo: Martin Cortés. (Mirandé and Enriquez, 1981).

Inks: the History that shifts



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The transformation of Malinche’s role in the historical

representation makes explicit the complexity of this character and

the different tactical uses she has been subjected to through the

centuries.

La Malinche in the History of the Conquistadores

The first time that la Malinche appears is in the first pages of Diaz

chronicle of la Conquista. “Before speaking about the great

Moctezuma (…) I should like to give an account of Doña Marina,

who had been a great lady and a Cacique over towns and vassalssince her childhood. (…) Doña Marina was a person of great

importance and was obeyed without question by al the Indians of

New Spain. (…) I have made a point of telling this story because

without Doña Marina we could not have understood the language of

New Spain and Mexico”(Diaz 1963: 86-87). As Somonte outlines

“Doña Marina did not limit herself to being an interpreter only, but

rather a collaborator involved in speaking and discussing with the

caciques: and with her brilliant mind, persuasion and dialogue were

facilitated [for the Spaniards]” (Somonte quoted and translated in

Candelaria 1980:3)

The symbolic alliance between La Maliche's sensual beauty,

tactical wisdom and Mayan aristocracy in these first chronicles, is

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characteristic of the narrative form used to convey the incredible and

mysterious 'discovery' of the new World. This - initially positive -

historical portrayal does not last for long. In Alva’s chronicles

(Candelaria, 1980), written a generation after the military campaign

on Mexico, La Malinche rapidly becomes a background figure in the

epic history of the Conquistadores. As Candelaria proposes “Alva

was perhaps … incapable of adjusting to the anomaly of a female’s

crucial role in molding the otherwise maleshaped events [of la

Conquista]”(1980:5). Through time, the face and the name of Doña

Marina do disappear from the history of la Conquista, where there isno longer room for the narration, the exploration and the negotiation

that the Malinche was performing. It is Alva that writes over the

political and military role of La Malinche and shifts her figure to

that of new preacher for the Catholic Church: “Marina, the tongue,

(…) was very important in the conversion of the natives and the

promulgation of our blessed Catholic Faith” (Alva in Candelaria,

1980:5)

The discussion of La Malinche as both a vehicle for dialogue and a

translator between different cultures is here discarded, deemed

counter-productive to the normalizing project of colonial domination

that emerges in the XVII century. This erasure is consistent with a

significant shift - from military appropriation to economic



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valorisation - that occurred between the XVII and XVIII centuries,

when the project of New Spain as a productive colony of the

Spanish Empire arose from the campaigns of discovery and

conquest. Blurring the border between the ‘Savage Indian’ and the

‘Catholic Spaniard’, the symbolic figure of La Malinche is

ambiguous and dangerous, posing a threat to the disciplinary

apparatus of colonial governance. Her face fades away and the

Virgen de Guadalupe appears as the new symbolic mother and

protector. “Guadalupe - as Paz (1985:73) highlights - is pure

receptivity (…): she consoles, quiets, dries tears, calms passions”.The Virgin articulated the complex re-composition of pre-

Colombian credence and rituals inside the governance system of the

Catholic Church: loyalty, virginity and devotion to The God and The

King substituted the sensuality, the ambivalence and the mystery of

La Malinche (Taylor, 2006).

La Malinche in Mexican History

At the hand of the Mexican nationalist writers La Malinche

reappears in official History in the XIX century, when she is

reinstated to investigate the birth of the Mexican people, defined as

La Raza. However, her experiences inhabits a problematic space,

because she blurs the linearity of the political production of the

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Mexican nation: her body not only represents the subjugation of the

Indigenous people, but also the betrayal of the Mother-as-traitor for

los hiojs de la chingada (Paz, 1985). The Mestizo as original

identity becomes entangled in the violence of the Conquista, in

which racial purity is both an aspiration and an impossibility.

This is one of the reasons why, in the XIX century several

authors tried to produce a parallel history, stigmatizing the

Malinchian behaviour and constituting a mythical, lost history to

which the birth of Mexican pueblo (Harris, 2006, Nevarez 2004)

might refer: Xicontencatl , published anonymously in 1826, and Los

martires de Anahuac, 1870, by Eligio Ancona are particularly

relevant to illustrate this point (Nevarez 2004).

In both of these texts the attempt is to produce a mythopoeisis

of the Mestizo origins. In Xicontencatl, Teutila the main character,

who represents la Malinche, is a slave sold to Cortés: she embodies

the Savage who has a natural tendency toward Truth (especially

concerning the existence of God) and who would not betray her

pueblo: she repels Cortés and tries to kill him. Failing in the effort of

resisting to the Conquista, she commits suicide to avoid subjection

to the Colonial power. As Nevarez argues, “The ‘moral’ of the story

is that indigenous women must die to preserver their honour or turn



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traitor. This step comes at the cost, however, of denying

motherhood” (2004:75). Los martires de Anahuac, instead, recounts

the history of Gelitzli: violated by the Conquistadores, she finds

refuge with her child among the Aztec populations. Here, the

traditional religious ministers affirm that she must give up her son to

calm the fury of the God Quetzalcoatl and the violence of the

Conquista. The last scene of this account is the ritual sacrifice of the

child accompanied by the impotent pain of Gelitzli. The newborn

represents the possible positive ancestor of La Raza and his mother

the positive counterpart of La Malinche: her desperation thusrepresents the pain of the whole Mexican pueblo that constantly and

in vain searches history for the proud and free origin of La Raza

(Nevarez, 2004). In these narrations, the mythic linearity of pre-

Colombian history – as origin of the homogeneity and the unity

of Mexican identity (Nevarez, 2004) - is proposed in opposition to

the heterogeneity of its population where La Malinche shows the

Nation as similar to the Bhabha’s proposal of the Nation as a

"liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses

of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples,

antagonistic authorities and tense location of cultural difference"

(Bhabha, 1994:212) . As Nevarez highlights, these mythopoeises

establishes their bases in the 'moral' that these stories “could have

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existed but the victor fails to mention [them], and the author takes

up the challenge of adding to the chronicles” (2004: 74).

This movement takes place on the terrain of a complex and

discontinuous Mexican history: here long dictatorships ruled by

post-colonial elites continuously and brutally correspond to popular

Levantamientos, producing a permanent dichotomization of the

Mexican society along the process of nationalization and

independence: Indigenous/Spanish and campasinos/aristocracy

dualities dominate the cultural representation as well as the social

composition of Mexico (Meyer and Sherman 1995). It is in this

dichotomy that the representation of La Malinche appears in Orozco,

1926, in which her downcast eyes symbolize the weakness of the

indigenous population. On the other hand, Orozco represents the

double-face of the Spanish power: Cortes, warmly takes the hand of

La Malinche while preventing her from helping her people,

massacred beneath her feet (Taylor, 2006). In representing La

Malinche as an independent figure, another image, this time by Frida

Kahlo, is the first to signal the complex role of La Malinche in the

history of the Mexican feminine subject. Interestingly, Kahlo takes

the name of La Malinche as a pseudonym for her own diaries,

blurring any difference between the painter and her subject. Kalho’s

portraits of La Malinche, as those by Rivera in Palacio Nacional of



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Mexico City, convey the sadness and the loneliness of La Malinche;

but make explici t her political function during the Conquista.

However, this complex vision disappears once more in the

1960s when la Malinche becomes a focal point in the narrative

analysis of Mexican identity by Octavio Paz (1985), El Labirinto de

la Soledad , which situates La Malinche in the transnational context

of the Mexican pueblo spread out in the United States. The violation

of La Malinche here stands in for the shame and eternal humiliation

of La Raza (Paz, 1985; Taylor 2006) and the origin of the Chicanos

non-participation in public and political spaces. Through this text

Paz accounts for Machismo as a social behaviour (Mirandé and

Enriquez, 1981): presenting the weakness of the women as

foundational to any understanding of Mexican male aggression.

Paz here writes la Malinche into the Movimiento Chicano

through an intellectual framework that re-inscribes the exclusion of

Chicanas from the collective articulations of Mexican identity:

“Every women is torn and open by the man, is the Chingada. In a

certain sense all of us, by the simple fact of being born of woman,

are hijos de la Chingada. But the singularity of ‘Mexican’ resides, I

believe, in his violent, sarcas tic humiliation of the Mother and his no

less violent affirmation of the Father” (1985:85-86). In this the view

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of la Malinche is the root of the abject passivity (Paz, 1985) of the

woman: “she does not resist violence, but is an inert heap of bone,

blood and dust. Her taint is constitutional and resides (…) in her s ex.

This passivity, open to the outside world, causes her to lose her

identity; she is the Chingada. She loses her name; she is no one; she

disappears into nothingness; she is Nothingness. (…). And as a

small boy will not forgive his mother if she abandons him to search

for his father, the Mexican people have not forgiven La Malinche for

her betrayal. ” (Paz 1985:87).

As outlined, from the Spaniard chronicles to Mexican

literature, the representation of La Malinche changes deeply. At

once, she has come to represent the traitor of pure origins, to

disclose the concrete process of La Conquista, to remind us of the

historic violence of pre-Columbian societies, and to reveal the

primary contradictions of the Mexican Nation. As a result La

Malinche can be read symbolically (Taylor, 2006) as a counter-

nationalist and therefore dangerous for the project of the male-

shaped Mexican Nation (Candelaria 1980).

The Chicanas and the reinterpretation of La Malinche

As emerges from the former paragraphs, the Malinche figure has

been represented in the Mexican history as both the traitor of her



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own roots and as the passive receptor of colonial power. But the

tricky linear and a-historical proposal of Paz has more and more

dangerous consequences since his proposal regards not only the

Mexican context but also the South of the United States where the

identity of Chicanos has appeared since the second half of the XIX

century. Indeed, if it is true, as Annalisa Taylor underlines, that

“Mestizo nationalist construction cast Malinche and Cortés as

racialized and gendered icons of the two halves (…) of modern

Mexican nationhood, one half Indian, female and dominated and the

other half male, European and power hungry”(Taylor, 2006:825),

the context of the 1960s anti-colonial, anti-imperial, labour and civil

rights struggles, reshaped the processes of racialization and

gendering inside the rise of the Chicano Movement.

It is not for chance, thus, that, since the 1960s, the Chicana

Feministas strongly rejects the traditional point of view of La

Malinche. Firstly, the Chicanas underline the complex articulation of

La Malinche character: is she the princess or the sold out daughter?

Is she the abandoned lover or the violated concubine? The

involuntary mother or the one separated from her child? (Moya,

1997). The Chicanas point of view on La Malinche eventually

becomes more and more complex while she is recognized “as

innately loyal yet tragically betrayed by those she loved and trusted

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the most: her mother, her lover … and her son Martin.” (Price,

2001:251). From here a process of identification from the Chicanas

to la Malinche arises, when during the 1970s the Chicanos

movement refuse any feminist demand, betraying the loyalty of the

women to the claims of La Raza. “She is a positive symbol because

‘malinche’ has become identified with ‘vendido’, or traitor – labels

which Chicana feminists have also endured” (Mirnadé and Enriquez,

1981:242).

Since then, as Moya argues, "Chicana feminists have addressed

the myth of Malinche and several have attempted to recuperate and

revalue her as a figure of empowering or empowered

womanhood"(1997:130). As read in the following poem by Tafolla

(1978) they give new voice to the Malinche: they want to hear her

words to understand the genealogy of gender power inside Mexican

society (Pratt, 1993). Her thus voice becomes a strategic body from

which to affirm their autonomy and disobedience.

Yo soy la Malinche.

My people called me Malintzín Tenepal

the Spaniards called me Doña Marina

I came to be known as Malinche



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and Malinche came to mean traitor.

And you came.

My dear Hernán Cortés, to share your “civilization” — to

play a god,

... and I began to dream . . .

I saw

and I acted.

I saw our world

And I saw yours

And I saw—

another.

(…)

No one else could see!

Beyond one world, none existed.

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(…)

My homeland ached within me

(but I saw another !).

Another world

a world yet to be born.

And our child was born ...

and I was immortalizedChingada!

(…)

But Chingada I was not.

Not tricked, not screwed, not traitor.

For I was not traitor to myself—

I saw a dream

and I reached it.

Another world………



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la raza.

La raaaaa-zaaaaa . . .

La Malinche here is an explorer of the world to come. She is

not anymore the object of the violation, but the subject of an action

that performs in a context – the violence of la Conquista - that

produces a new space where nei ther loyalt ies nor rules are prefixed.

La Malinche escapes from the objective function imposed to the

women both in the pre-Columbian and the Spaniard culture (Pratt,1993) and represent the political escape of the Chicanas in the face

of the anti-feminist reaction of the Chicanos Movement.

This strategic role of la Malinche arose inside the specific

history of Chicano Movement, when the perspective of the Mexican

pueblo was not rooted anymore only in the national space of the

Mexico (Paz, 1985). Both the sale of the north part of the country to

United States in the 1850s and the (politically and economically

motivated) migration flows of the first half of the XX century

(Meyer and Sherman, 1995) produced a significant settlement of

Mexican population in the major cities of the southern part of the

United States.

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In the 1950s, the social exclusion of this population implied a

marginal participation of the Chicanos both in the North American

labour movements of the first half of the XX century and in the

Black American movements for civil rights after the second world

war. It is in the 1950s when the Chicanos started to organize both for

labour and social rights that, in their organization, probably due to

the double exclusion from the broader movements, two important

features emerged: firstly the Movimiento coped with the analysis of

the internal colonialism of United States and linked itself to the

Mexican revolution and to the anti-colonialist movements (Young,

1972; Mirandé and Enriquez, 1981); secondly, from here emerged

the identitarian definition of La Raza as subject and the Barrio as

strategic space for organization (Plan de Aztlan, 1969). These

resulted in the involvement of the community and its different social

subjects in the struggle, but also led to the subordination of any

other issue to the Chicano’s demands and to their relegation of any

internal clash to the principle of loyalty and membership.

In Denver in 1969 the Plan de Aztlan affirms the priority of LaRaza claims over any other demands: this implies a priority of

Chicano ethnic identity over any other subjective layer (Plan de

Aztlan, 1969). Likewise, the message is clear towards any foreigner

out of the community: “For la Raza todo. Fuera de la Raza nada”



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(Plan de Aztlan, 1969). Autonomy, loyalty and unity are the tenets

of the Movimiento.

Feministas, vendidas, malinches

When the Plan de Aztlan ratifies the internal political Pact of the

Movimiento Chicano, the rupture and the internal clash with the

feminist Chicanas is an open battlefield. As Longauex y Vasquez

recorded “when the time came for the women to report to the full

conference, the only thing that the workshop representative had to

say was this: ‘it was the consensus of the group that the Chicana

woman does not want to be liberated’” (Vidal, 1971).

The refusal of any political role for women could not have

been more bitter, but many Chicanas were already “rejecting the

philosophy that a woman’s place is in the home as a mother of a

large family.” The Chicano’s excuse was that they were rejecting

their culture when they attempted to reclaim rights, to be visible in

the public sphere, to study in the universities: “[the Chicanas’]

response to the charge that they betrayed their culture and heritage

was ‘Our culture, hell!’” (Mirandé and Enriquez, 1981:253).

From this moment until 1971, several groups emerged opening

local chapters in the college campuses, writing for several

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periodicals, organizing interpersonal networks of communication,

discussing their issues in women’s panels in the Chicano

conferences and opening feminine projects for civil rights and

labour struggles (Mirandé and Enriquez, 1981). This emergence of a

spontaneous movement to affirm the will of liberation of the mujeres

chicanas led to the Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza held in

Houston in 1971 (Moya, 1997).

At the time, Chicanas opened different fields of struggle: they

self organized as women in the textile factories and in the farms

(Young, 1972), they launched campaigns for health and education

involving the whole Barrio community (Mirandé and Enriquez,

1981), they problematized the sphere of sexuality, starting a tough

conflict with the Catholic Church, strategic ally for the Chicano

Movement (Vidal, 1971). Their movement in the political space was

unpredictable and they did not respect any established belonging:

the affirmation of autonomy of the Chicanas challenged any

classical conception of membership and introduced in the debate the

topics of temporality, reciprocity, tactics and strategies for politicalidentities. In other words, the attempt of Chicanas feminists was to

perform a variable geometry of alliances, which was transversal to

all the relations of powers in which they were inscribed. In order to

reclaim their political space, they (had to) deconstruct both the



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linearity of the internal colonial opposition (imposed by the

Chicanos) and the universality of gender emancipation (proposed by

the anglo-feminists1), moving among these discursive fields in

tactical instead of ideological terms.

In order to deal with this double political opposition, the

Chicanas needed to root their struggle in the Mexican revolutionary

soldaderas - the Mexican feminist who had an important role during

the Madero and Zapata’s revolutions, conquering rights and political

power. Through this rooting process, the Chicanas movement also

affirmed its political independence and non-negotiable egoism

(Candelaria, 1980). In other words, they did not look for any re-

composition in the existent political space but for a new path and

new roads of subjectivation (Mirandé and Enriquez 1981); in this

decision to act and move towards an ulterior space, the character of

La Malinche was strategically useful for both the symbols and the

ambivalences she brought with her.

Exploring the third space

1It is the case of the rupture with the Chicanos as well it is with the Anglo-feminism from

which they need to affirm their autonomy: according to Mirandé and Enriquez (1981), the

Anglo-feminists were trying to shape the emerging movement, proposing gender asuniversal vector for emanciapation through an alliances of women issues, back grounding

and hiding the different focuses on class or racial division in the American Society.

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The first link between the Chicanas and la Malinche was produced

by the Chicanos who, when the feministas articulated their position

as Mexican-American and women, accused them of being

Malinchistas, resurrecting the connotation of La Malinche as traitor.

The Chicanas decided to inhabit this pejorative brand because, re-

using Bhabha words, they recognized themselves as vernacular

cosmopolitans (Bhabha, 2002: 24) that have “to translate between

cultures and across them in order to survive, not in order to assert

the sovereignty of a civilized class or the spiritual autonomy of a

revered ideal” (Bhabha, 2002: 24). This permanent movement for

survival linked them to la Malinche: she has also occupied a

territory filled with contradictions, but did not renounce from this

(imposed) position (Taylor, 2006) to tactically move to reach her

goals: negotiating and dealing she abandoned the lines of resistance,

of opposition and of frontal struggles, problematizing, beyond any

nationalistic rhetoric, both the utopian history and the everyday life

of the Chicano society.

Disclosing this rhetoric, la Malinche challenged the conceptionof the History proposed by both Paz and by the Mexican nationalist:

sold by her family, she was forced to renounce any membership to

any people. Instead, she opened up an unpredictable third space

(Bhabha, 1994 or ‘another world’, Tafolla 1978), “learning that hard



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lesson of ambivalence and forbearance” (Bhabha, 2002: 24). In this

space of ambiguity, she has to negotiate her identity, abandoning her

inherited identity without any possibility of inclusion in the Spaniard

society. In this space, both the Chicanas and la Malinche

experienced the impossibility of belonging, because their freedom as

women was not figured in either their mythic origins, nor in the

political project of La Raza (Pratt 1993; Vidal, 1971). It is from this

positionality, where identity is constructed and re-constructed, that

they situated their own identity and built their strategy for

emancipation. La Malinche’s project, as Tafolla (1978) outlines,

posited another world and another pueblo, with a view and a strategy

that were grounded in her concrete situation. Similarly, The

Chicanas neither abandoned the Chicanos struggle, nor denied

themselves a strategy based in their specific struggles as women.

They renounced universalism, while affirming the need for an

alliance of singularities (Mirandé and Enriquez, 1981).

Yet the decision to inhabit this space is complex and

interesting at the same time: as argued by Taylor, re-using Spivak (1990), “la Malinche [becomes] a symbol of the postcolonial

condition […] finding herself in the ambivalent position of having to

‘critic a space one inhabits intimately’”(Taylor, 2006:825): the force

of the extreme choice of La Malinche for the Chicanas discourse

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resides properly in the possibility to find in this space she opens a

critical but original position and a voice to use strategically for their

aims. Moya, however, underlines here the risk of an extreme use of

La Malinche: also if “the experience and the theorizing of

marginalized or oppressed people is important for arriving at a more

objective understanding of the world (…), I would suggest that

neither marginality nor survival are sufficient goals for a feminist

project”(Moya, 1997:131).

Conclusions

More than even Cortés, or Moctezuma, it is important to note

that it is La Malinche who is blamed for the violence of La

Conquista. We might consider this fact in light of two primary

threats La Malinche has come to pose: one, the impossibility of the

pure origins, and two, her disclosure of the concrete memory of la

Conquista, with its violence, its materiality and its choices. As

observed, the complexity and the ambivalence of Malinche’s

movement between different identities destabilises the Mexican

nationalist project: La Malinche unveils some real aspects of the pre-

Columbian societies, the division of the peoples, the presence of the

slave system, the condition of the woman, showing the original and

contradictory complexity of the Mexican Utopia.



27

This position is key to understanding why her figure has been

so important for the Mexican feminists, involved in two battles at

the same time: for their rights as Mexican and as women. This

power of La Malinche becomes stronger in the North American

context, where the contradictions of the social Chicano Movement

regarding identity and machismo explode in the 1970s.

In this multiple, historical and political rupture, that involves

both the images and the language of their original culture, the

Chicanas open a third space and inhabit it through the symbolic

body and the collective name of La Malinche (Tafolla, 1978).

Through this appropriation, there is a shift in the historical and

symbolic function of La Malinche, that assumes a tactical role in the

definition of a strategic identity for the Chicanas: in this shift the

historically negative connotation of La Malinche fades away and

some concrete dimensions of her experience become visible once

again, strategically useful to the political project of emancipation of

the Chicana feminists in the contemporary context.

However as Moya outlines, the marginal position of La

Malinche can only be a starting point for any feminist political

project: in this sense it is interesting to look at two trajectories that

the figure of La Malinche might open up in the contemporary

28

context. The first is the de-universalization proposed by the Chicana

emancipation project, which affirms that equality and freedom are

"not negotiable. Anyone opposing the right of women to organize

into their own form of organization has no place in the leadership of

the movement. FREEDOM IS FOR EVERYONE". However, we

might also look to the definition of La Malinche proposed by Donna

Harraway, that inscribes her in a new space of struggle as cyborg

mother: “”the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of

the mestizo ‘bastard’ race of the new world, master of languages,

and mistress of Cortés [carries] special meaning […] Sister Outsider

hints at the possibility of world survival not because of her

innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to

write without the founding myth of original wholeness […]

Malinche was mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden

fruit” (Haraway 1990).

While contradictory, these two proposed trajectories for La

Malinche, one singularizing, the other re-inscribing her into a post-

human universality, might, in their tension pose La Malinche as anenfant perdue, a living, political prototype for the lexicon of trans-

national feminism.



29 30

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la malinche a symbol of emancipation for contemporary chicanas

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