The first imaginary Malintzin took form when three cultural threads intertwined: the spread throughout the West of the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism; the fascination with Cortés as a suitable subject for epic poetry or prose, renewed (as we saw earlier) in the late eighteenth century; and the genesis of a legendary “doña Marina” who embodied the nineteenth-century stereotype of the ideal woman. She was thus “of noble birth, beauty, and quick genius,” with “an affectionate heart and generous temper.” Her services as interpreter were “invaluable” and saved Spanish lives. And, most significant of all, “she was the first Mexican who embraced Christianity.” This “extraordinary woman” was “exceedingly beautiful” and had “winning manners, and a warm and loving heart.” She quickly became fluent in Spanish and “deemed herself the honored wife of Cortez”—oblivious to the sinful bigamy committed by the conquistador in entering “this unhallowed union.”16
This “Marina” was above all sanctified by the qualities of love and loyalty: “‘I am more happy,’ said she one day, ‘in being the wife of my lord and master Cortez, and of having a son by him, than if I had been sovereign of all of New Spain.’” That was how an Anglo-American pastor put it at the dawn of the twentieth century, but a Mexican playwright generations later imagined these breathless words of hers: “I dreamt his dreams of gold, his childish and tireless dreams of wealth and power. But I caressed the living gold of his hair. Mine was the treasure of his breathing, living body.”17
Few authors who borrowed Malintzin as a literary character made claims to historical accuracy. Yet the vast majority imagined her as a figure of—or metaphor for—tragic romance or romantic tragedy. And that Malintzin has persisted as a virtual industry of creativity, due to the sheer volume of attention given to her—from late-nineteenth-century figures of lasting significance (like Eligio Ancona and Ireneo Paz) to twentieth-century writers of particular importance to Mexican culture (like Salvador Novo and Rodolfo Usigli) to others who have achieved an international impact (like Laura Esquivel and Carlos Fuentes).
Thus, arguably, regardless of how complex or sophisticated the intention of poets, novelists, screenwriters, and historians has been, the net effect is to turn the Spanish-Aztec War into a tragic romance. And as such, it is never too far from the Maurin lithograph in which a fictionalized Aztec lord gives his Malintzin-like sister to Cortés, with the caption “Cortés accepted the invaluable gift of the cacique chief, and that was the first day of a passion that cast some sweetness onto the bloody triumphs of the conqueror of Mexico.”18
The second of the three invented Malintzins emerged in Mexico as something of a reaction to the romantic, sanctified, whitewashing version. This was the “lustful, conniving traitor” who made early appearances in nineteenth-century plays and novels, achieving deep cultural roots in the early twentieth century, when Mexican Spanish adopted the neologism malinchista to refer to a turncoat or traitor. The third Malintzin evolved in turn in reaction to that deeply negative one, developing when late-twentieth-century feminists argued that she was repeatedly victimized (both in her lifetime, and in her image in modern Mexico); that emphasis was later modified to argue that she was a victim with agency—a survivor.19
Malintzin the victim/survivor is in some ways no closer to the historical Malintzin than any of her other invented manifestations; as a “transfigured symbol of fragmented identity and multiculturalism” she is more of an expression of modern (or postmodern) anxieties than a recognizable figure from the Aztec world. And yet in other ways this Malintzin better helps us to get around the distortions and distractions of the Malintzins and Marinas and Malinches invented over the past two centuries.20
For whether Malintzin is seen as the saintly doña Marina or the devilish la Malinche, her legend leads back to a legendary Cortés. For better or worse, “as moth falls into the torchlight, / She fell to his brilliant alluring” (as a second-rate poet put it in 1885). Or as Abbott put it (in 1856), she was so “devotedly attached” to him because his great “energy, magnanimity, fearlessness, and glowing temperament” served “to rouse a woman’s love.” The issue here is therefore not just Cortés as legend, but the irresistibility (for male historians) of Cortés as a legendary womanizer.21
Gómara and Solís relished that reputation; Díaz listed all Cortés’s children and their various mothers (as did Hugh Thomas, under “Cortés’s ladies”). For Abbott, Cortés was an “ardent lover” as a teenager; he “cruelly trifled” with the affections of doña Catalina; he is overwhelmingly alluring to the lovestruck Malintzin. “In his relations with women,” mused one historian, Cortés “reveals a primitive, polygamous temperament.” For others, the conquistador’s need to sow his seed was similarly a primal mandate, determined by the desire to populate the New World and plant in it “a new type of human being.” His “progression of carnal love . . . has all the magnitude of a biblical verse in which Jehovah blesses the fecundity, often incestuous, of the patriarchs, for that perpetuates the species.”22
There was, in other words, cosmic significance to “this conquistador’s amorous leaps [lances amorosos] at kingdoms and ladies.” Over the centuries, Cortés the womanizer evolved into a tripartite symbol: one of male dominance and machismo, swashbuckling and seductive, sword-wielding yet heart-winning; the emblematic founding father, both the first example and the symbol of the male fertility required to germinate a new race in a New World; and, in the gendered vision of the Spanish conquest and of the encounter of European and “Indian” civilizations, the masculine Christian conqueror of the feminized heathen.23
The problems with all this are many, but a couple are important to us here. Most obviously, the notion of Cortesian exceptionalism once again rears its ugly head. Yet Cortés was by no means unique among the conquistadors in having multiple sexual relationships of varying kinds with indigenous women—as we shall see shortly. Furthermore, his Coyohuacan palace full of women was arguably a function of his inheritance of the mantle of imperial office. With the huey tlahtoani captive and his palace in Tenochtitlan destroyed, the surviving royalty and nobility initially gravitated toward what appeared to be the new center of imperial power. This meant not only filling the palace with women, just as Montezuma was believed to maintain thousands of concubines, but maintaining as many as possible of the very same women—Montezuma’s own daughters, Cuauhtemoc’s own wives, the royal women of the Aztec dynasty of Tenochtitlan and Tetzcoco.
Vásquez de Tapia, either unwittingly or knowingly, hit the nail on the head when he remarked that Cortés “in some ways lived more as a heathen than as a good Christian, especially in having an infinite number of women within his house.” In other words, Cortés’s famous womanizing was less about him as an individual, and far more about him as just another conquistador (Spanish men in this war almost all behaved this way) and, somewhat paradoxically, about the position he held; for as inheritor of the mantle of ruler, he had to take on the role of a tlahtoani impersonator.24
But whether Cortés’s “ladies” are seen as mere evidence of his machismo or as conquest metaphors, a crucial issue has tended to be marginalized, ignored, or sugarcoated—with respect to both women and Mexico: that of consent. Here, then, is the rub. Did Cortés kill doña Catalina? I suspect he angrily assaulted her, causing her sufficient physical distress for her illness to end her life; a modern verdict might be manslaughter, although it would surely stick in the craw of judge and jury. But pondering the possibility of foul play distracts us from the more compelling and revealing themes exposed by the moment: the roles and experiences of women, Spanish and indigenous, in the war and its aftermath; the ubiquitous evidence and echo of violence; and the disturbing intersection between those two themes.25
Was Malintzin another of his victims, drawn to his flame like a moth; was she a slave struggling to survive, or a sly manipulator of men? By focusing on one Nahua woman, however unusual or extraordinary her personal story may seem to be, we run the risk of forgetting what a
spects of her experience were shared by thousands of others. What do glimpses into the lives of Malintzin (or doña Catalina or Leonor Pizarro or Tecuichpo) tell us about the other women—Spanish, Taíno, Nahua; probably Totonac and African too; wives, concubines, slaves—in the Coyohuacan house and in the houses of other conquistadors? What had they endured, and would they endure, as a result of the war men had waged and the new political arrangements they fought to forge? What kind of place had Mexico become that we can contemplate whether Cortés was a wife killer—and then dismiss the question as beside the point?
Consider, then, the engravings that accompanied accounts of the moment when Malintzin first met Cortés—another meeting within this story, and one that, like the Meeting, has been romanticized as surrender. Specifically, consider the engravings common in the eighteenth century (one example began this chapter, another is in our Gallery), before the many Malintzins had been created. In the version printed in 1754 with the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire Générale des Voyages, for example, there is a tiny anticipation of Romanticism in the accompanying text: the granting of “twenty Indian women” to make bread, opined the abbot, was just “the excuse for them to be received; for it is certain that Cortés took an inclination toward one of these women, whom he had baptized under the name Marina and made his mistress. She was, according to Díaz, of a rare beauty and elevated bearing.”26
Yet the image itself captures something very different: a group of teenage girls, completely naked, innocent, being sized up by armed men, among whom they are to be divided up as slaves; and there could be no doubt—either in 1519, or in 1754, or today—that they were to serve as sex slaves. This is where the death of doña Catalina leads us: to her Taíno and Nahua rivals, to the many Malintzins, to “Indians” that a Spaniard can call his or hers, to the other nineteen girls “given” to conquistadors along with Malintzin, to the thousands of indigenous teenagers forced into sexual slavery, to the tens of thousands of indigenous families torn apart by war and disease and the oft-ignored scourge of mass enslavement.
* * *
In the spring of 1548, just a few months after Cortés’s death, the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor, Carlos V, issued an extraordinary edict. Over two pages of dictation to his secretary, Juan de Sámano, the king came close to a denunciation of conquistador atrocities that would have made Las Casas proud. (Indeed, the friar surely had much to do with the edict; he sailed to Spain the previous summer, and earlier in 1548 pleaded with the king to order his officials to enforce the 1542 laws restricting indigenous slavery.)27
Addressing the royal government in New Spain, Carlos began by raising the specter of the twenty-year investigation into Cortés—the residencia inquiry that had petered out a few years earlier. “Among the various charges made against him,” stated the king, were five specific allegations of the mass enslavement of “Indians” during the conquest war. As “nobody can in good conscience and title hold such Indians as slaves,” noted the king, he therefore ordered all of Cortés’s surviving slaves “to be freed, and the same goes for their children and the descendants of all the women taken as slaves.”
The edict effectively condemned Cortés posthumously, not only for enslaving indigenous people but also for his role in the five massacres that accompanied the seizures. First, according to Carlos’s reading of the residencia files, Olid “seized peacefully” the entire population of the town of Quecholac and brought them to Cortés, who was nearby in Tepeyacac (Tepeaca; this would have been in September 1520, a few days after the attack on Tepeaca itself.) Cortés separated “the Indian men, some four hundred of them who were of fighting age, and had all of them killed; those who were left, some three thousand women and children, he had branded as slaves.”
This pattern was allegedly then repeated. When Sandoval escorted porters carrying wood for the brigantines from Tlaxcallan to Tetzcoco, he passed through the town of Calpulalpan, where “the people had peacefully submitted.” No matter: “many of them were killed, and many seized, women as well, and taken to Tetzcoco,” where “they were branded as slaves and sold.” The edict went on to third and fourth examples. When Cortés went to war against the provinces of Cuauhnahuac (Cuernavaca) and Huaxtepec, despite their peaceful submission the local men were again slaughtered, “and more than five hundred souls were branded as slaves.” Finally, “when the said don Hernando went to war against the city of Chulula [Cholollan]” (here the king jumped back to 1519), the people peacefully gave him the supplies he needed. But when “four thousand Indians, more or less,” were gathered in the plaza to serve as porters, Cortés “without any cause ordered the Spaniards to kill them, and thus had many killed and the others enslaved.”
What are we to make of this document? It has been published several times, beginning as early as 1596, and yet given passing attention, if that, by historians. Should we dismiss it as too little, too late? Perhaps. Calling these atrocities, three decades later, “bad deeds for which there was no reason for them to have been done” was arguably a meaningless and mild condemnation. Or should we consider the edict merely a confirmation of events already known (and—in the case of Tepeaca, Quecholac, and Cholollan—already mentioned in this book, as in many before it)? Again, perhaps; for there is certainly plenty of corroborating evidence that the massacres and mass enslavements took place.
In fact, the edict of 1548 was conservative in estimating numbers of indigenous victims. When the elimination of Quecholac’s population came up in Cortés’s residencia inquiry, he himself admitted that he ordered five hundred men executed. His justification was that it served as a warning to others not to attack Spaniards traveling between Vera Cruz and Tenochtitlan—a rationale repeated by pro-Cortés witnesses. Vásquez de Tapia, however, estimated the slaughter at two thousand men, with some four thousand women and children enslaved. Nor does the edict mention what appeared to have happened days earlier to the people of Tepeaca itself: some four hundred Tepeacan warriors were killed in an open battle with a Spanish-Tlaxcalteca force outside the town, followed by a brutal sacking of the town. Hundreds were lanced or spiked, torn apart by Spanish mastiffs (aperreados, or “dogged”), butchered in their own homes, or—one conquistador, Diego de Ávila, claimed—thrown alive from rooftops to waiting Tlaxcalteca warriors. Ávila and a couple of other conquistadors claimed that the Tlaxcalteca ate the Tepeacans (although Cortés justified the slaughter to the king on the grounds that the Tepeacans “are all cannibals”). Across the region, dozens of towns and villages (some said forty) were sacked, thousands executed, and the survivors—including tens of thousands of women and children—branded as slaves. They received the G (for Guerra, “war”) on their faces. There were complaints that the captains monopolized the best-looking women, leaving only “old and wrecked ones” to the other Spaniards.28
We shall return shortly to some of these details that hint at scales of violence, rape, and slavery—and at issues of responsibility and culpability. But for now, let us follow the indigenous survivors, those who witnessed their family members being slaughtered, and were then branded, sold, and marched off to live as the property of Spaniards. Is it possible to find any of them still alive, at the time of that 1548 edict? As it happens, it is.
IN THE WAKE OF CORTÉS’S DEATH, there were dozens of lawsuits and legal proceedings related to his lengthy will and extensive estate (contrary to the persistent myth that he “died in deep poverty and all alone”). Among that documentation, scattered across archives in Spain and Mexico, is a hefty inventory of Cortés’s property in and around Cuauhnahuac (running to some seventy pages in modern print, although including only part of the Cuauhnahuac holdings and none of the properties in Mexico City, Coyohuacan, the Toluca valley, the great marquisate in Oaxaca, and so on). Along with the buildings, lands, and equipment related to wheat, silk, and sugar operations were listed 287 slaves, 94 of them “blacks,” mostly born in Africa. As a reminder of the violent nature of forced labor, iron equipment for the disciplining of slaves w
as also listed: braces, collars, chains, and “a cage [prisión] for slaves, with four iron chains.”29
The other 193 slaves were “Indians.” Those “Indians” were not listed as mere numbers; their names, ages, and towns of origin were included. “Juan Ucelote [Oçelote],” for example, was “an Indian man, native of Ecatepeque, fifty years of age, and he seemed as much.” There is sufficient detail in the lists of slaves to even offer us a hint of human life, as if in reading each entry we are catching the glimpse of a ghost. “Isabel Siguaquesuchil [Cihuatlexochitl], an Indian woman, native of Tlaxcala [Tlaxcallan], forty-three years of age.” “Juan Xitl, an Indian man, a native of Guaxaca [Oaxaca], forty-one years old, said to be an oven-worker.” “Cecilia, an Indian slave woman, condemned to twenty years, native of Tepexi, forty years of age.” And this poignant, thought-provoking entry: “Cristóbal, an Indian native of this New Spain, who says he doesn’t know where he is from, because he was small when he came into the power of the Spaniards; he is [now] thirty-five years of age, a little more or less.”30
This Cristóbal would have been about six years old at the height of the Spanish-Aztec War. Conquistadors thus enslaved him as a child. The slaves on Cortés’s Cuauhnahuac estate were, on average, eleven years old in 1520. The slaves at Tlaltenango and adjacent sugar operations—some 165 in total—were between six and thirty-one at the war’s peak, but averaged eighteen; the vast majority (93 percent) were under twenty-two, averaging seventeen years old. In other words, during the war and the subsequent campaigns of the 1520s across Mesoamerica, it was indigenous children and teenagers who were enslaved in massive numbers.
These survivors on the marquis’s estates—outliving Cortés himself—represented the tip of an iceberg of child slavery. Their places of origin are highly varied (86 towns for the 193 slaves), reflecting the levels of displacement and shattering of families and communities. They also map many of the campaigns, and especially the massacres and mass enslavements, of the war: Tepeaca and Cholollan; Zacatepec, Izúcar, and Huaxtepec; Oaxaca and Guatemala. And towns that allied with the invaders in the war are equally well represented—especially Tlaxcallan and Tetzcoco (at 11 percent and 7 percent, the best-represented towns in the list)—a reminder that the myths of immediate welcome and surrender hid more complex tales of resistance, for which children paid a lifelong price.
When Montezuma Met Cortes Page 34
