Malintzin and A New Approach to Microhistory

Malintzin’s Choices is a fascinating book, true to form for the books in this course, but it takes a very different approach to microhistory from anything we have read previously. With no written first-person accounts to establish the framework for Townsend’s history, she had to get to the subject of her history – Malintzin – in a different way. As she said in her introduction, this is really a book about context. Rather than taking the reader inside the life of the subject and looking outward to explore and learn about the contextual world around her, Townsend builds the contextual world first and then uses the available details within that known context to construct the unknown details of Malintzin’s life. This is a difficult microhistorical methodology, requiring substantial knowledge of the historical context in order to identify the necessary details to inductively develop the subject.

The idea of creating a detailed sketch of a person’s life by examining everything the world in which that person lived is a little like a sculptor carving an equine statue by taking a block of marble and chipping away everything that doesn’t look like a horse. If you’re really good, as Townsend is, you’ll end up with something beautiful. If, on the other hand, you are not incredibly knowledgeable about the world in which your subject lived, you are more likely to end up with a statue of a five-legged llama, or maybe just a nondescript blob. There is an art to writing the way Townsend does in Malintzin’s Choices, and neophyte students of the art probably should not attempt it.

Having said that, it is important to recognize that Townsend proved herself to be remarkably gifted at this form of art. She took a long misunderstood, even maligned, historical figure and crafted an entirely new narrative with virtually no direct evidence to support it, but a narrative that is nonetheless compelling and arguably quite accurate given the voluminous circumstantial evidence on which she relied. Has Townsend exonerated Malintzin? I think so, or at the very least, she provided an alternate and believable narrative that makes her actions and decisions understandable. Townsend showed that Malintzin lived in an unimaginably complicated, difficult world, faced impossible choices, and did the best she could – probably the best anyone could be expected to do – given her situation.