My visits to the Denver Art Museum’s "The Legacy of La Malinche: Traitor, Survivor, Icon" were enriched by two extraordinary women.
The first gallery companion was a friend who is a Mexican-born painter and sculptor. It was illuminating to see through the eyes of a modern creative woman the hold that a 16th century sister has had on Mexico’s artistic imagination.
La Malinche, of North America’s Nahuatl-speaking people, was enslaved by the Mayans, who in turn gave her to Cortes and his Conquistadores. La Malinche learned Spanish and translated for Cortes from Nahuatl and Mayan. Cortes was twice her age and held the power of conqueror over her and her people. She bore a son fathered by Cortes, who then handed her over to one of his officers, who fathered her daughter.
My friend recognized some of the show’s images of La Malinche from her elementary school history text books and calendars in her family home. Back then in Mexico, La Malinche was painted as either the “mother” of the dominant mestizo population, or as a traitor to the Indigenous people of the region. Even as a little girl, my artist friend said, she knew there was something unfair about either depiction. My friend embraced the nuanced perspective of the Denver Art Museum show curated by Terezita Romo, who teaches in the Chicana/o Studies Department at University of California, and Victoria Lyall, the Denver Art Museum’s Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Art of the Ancient Americas.
Some have vilified La Malinche for helping Cortez and bearing Spaniards’ children. Her name became the root of the insult "malinchista," hurled by Mexicans at other Mexicans they saw as choosing white culture over their own. A Mexican man who has an Anglo girlfriend is macho. A Mexican woman doesn’t even have to have an Anglo boyfriend to be accused of cultural betrayal, of being malinchista. She could, as my friend has done, simply have asserted her independence by traveling abroad for work or to study. My friend says she has been called malinchista, and that it stings.
The Denver Art Museum show explores how Mexican feminists began to hear in "malinchista" an attempt to shame women who made their own choices. The show also sets La Malinche in a global context. One piece is a photograph in which the Indiana-born artist Robert Buitron uses models to resurrect both La Malinche and Pocahantos. In his vision, the two seem to be working over coffee, each with a computer open before her as they chat. My friend looked very carefully at the photo and said the setting reminded her of a favorite café in Mexico City. She was also reminded of a time when women were frowned upon for entering pulquerías, informal bars that served pulque, a traditional drink made from fermented agave sap. My friend was once shooed away from a pulquería she had wandered into unaware.
By the time we were done at the museum, my friend was proud to call herself malinchista.
A few weeks later, I visited La Malinche with my daughter, who has written about colonization’s impact on African women. My daughter is now bringing her feminist perspective to a college world historiography class, and she told me her teacher and fellow students had discussed La Malinche.
Historiography is the study of the way history is told. It matters who is doing the telling. La Malinche never got to give her own version. The stories told about La Malinche can’t even start with her real name, which has been lost. We just know that the Spanish converted her to Christianity and gave her the name Marina. Malinche is probably how the peoples of the Americas heard the European word “Marina.”
My daughter has been accompanying me to museums since she was a toddler, when I would settle her on gallery floors with paper and pencils and encourage her to copy her favorite pieces. My ulterior motive was to get her to stay still long enough for me to enjoy the art. But soon I was the one impatiently asking if we could move on to the next gallery. My daughter is 18 now and still has great gallery stamina. The art of "Traitor, Survivor, Icon" drew her attention as much as its history lessons.
A lovely 2013 bronze by the sculptor Armando Baeza greets visitors at the start of the exhibit, offering an image of La Malinche as she might have been as a young, carefree girl - before she was swept up in world-changing events. Later in the show, my daughter and I gazed together as if hypnotized at a 1964 painting by Antonio Ruiz called "El Sueno de la Malinche" (Malinche's Dream), a surrealist scene in which a blanket arranged over a sleeping La Malinche is also a pastoral view of a town Cortez destroyed. Ruiz managed to make the scene both soothing and troubling. La Malinche looks so very tired.
My daughter particularly liked the bold colors and style reminiscent of cubism of another 1964 painting, this one by Jorge Gonzalez Camarena and called "La Pareja." Cortez in full armor strides alongside a nude Malinche, the power couple of modern Mexico surrounded by symbols of Spain and pre-colonial Mexico. The curators positioned a photograph of a 1926 mural of Cortez and La Malinche as a couple across the gallery, as if to interrogate Gonzalez Camarena's version. In the 1926 mural, which can be found on the walls of Mexico City’s Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Jose Clemente Orozco portrayed both Cortez and La Malinche nude, but the conqueror's skin has the cool metallic tones of armor. Cortez's foot rests on a corpse whose warm brown flesh echoes the hues in which La Malinche is painted. Clemente Orozco's Cortez grasps La Malinche by her right hand with his own and his left arm is thrust across her chest, as if to subdue her.
As visitors emerge from "The Legacy of La Malinche,” they are offered index cards and asked to write what they have learned about La Malinche in six words. My daughter wrote: “A young woman trying to survive.”