Malintzin's Choices?

I really liked this book. It was actually a page-turner toward the end. And it is not a micro history, but rather a biography of a woman who was placed in an incredible position through the accident of time and geography and birth. Townsend's book does an incredible job of telling the story from the perspective of both the Spanish and the "indigenous". The entire book is actually one long "perhaps" because Marina did not leave any written trail of her own. That left the author to fill in the spaces using other sources. Townsend acknowledges the Spanish sources are clearly biased, and native sources were not written until almost 20 years after the events. That leaves a tightrope to be walked when telling the story.

We have talked before about creolization. Marina was clearly an Indian, but hers was the first generation to come to terms with the Spanish, and the last to live before the conquest. What I learned from this book is that except for the first Carib's or Taino's to see Columbus' ships pull up, indigenous people knew there were "others" coming. And before the Conquistadors were successful, their diseases almost cleared the playing field.

Townsend makes it clear that the Spanish prevailed because they had superior technology, nothing more. It was interesting to read that American's were still in the Stone Age, and relatively new to agriculture, because the corn they grew did not offer the protein available in European's wheat. Marina, and others we must presume, were wise enough to see the inevitable. Or, they were simply wise enough to navigate a dangerous situation and survive.

My favorite passage is pure speculation, not based on historical evidence, but tells what Marina must have experienced at the birth of her first child. Townsend juxtaposes the Indian tradition of "helping a woman try to rally toward the end of labor" with the Spanish atmosphere of "praying for help, even mercy." It was a big difference, "All her life, she had thought of a woman giving birth as a warrior, a hero who had the opportunity to win honor, not as someone who begged for mercy in the face of a great punishment being inflicted by the deity." (140) In this book, what happened to the women is not an after thought. It reveals women's vulnerability and exploitation by Indians and Spanish, women's dealing with the sometime cruelty of their own reproductive biology, and women's ability to make decisions for themselves where ever possible within an oppressive system.