Sources Moving beyond a Spanish-Indigenous Dichotomy

Malintzin’s Choices is a fascinating and creative into the life and surrounding world of the translator of Cortés. I was especially struck by the way Camilla Townsend used her sources to illuminate the multi-faceted world that Malintzin and the other indigenous peoples inhabited during the period of the Spanish conquest of the Mexica. In doing so, she questions the credibility of some of the long-standing ideas surrounding the conquest that generally caricature the various indigenous peoples as naive and unsophisticated. She demonstrates that the idea the Nahua thought the Spanish were Gods is more likely an invented tradition. Instead, the Nahua meant something along the lines of “sorcerer” when using the word “teotl” (49-50). Here, Townsend used her understanding of the Nahua world, Spanish sources, the Nahuatl language as well as the contexts behind the production of Nahuatl sources to come to this conclusion. In a strange but convincing irony, she disputes the Nahuatl sources produced under the aegis of a Franciscan priest, and brings to bear a close reading of sources from Cortés and Charles V that make possibility that they perceived the word teotl to mean God sound ridiculous (46-51). Her knowledge of the Nahuatl language here is incredibly important.

Taking into account the contexts of the production of her sources is one of the greatest strengths of Townsend’s analysis.  This is clear in her discussion of the importance of translators in the Spanish conquest, and the significance of Manlintzin in particular. Instead of reading the Nahuatl sources in combination and drawing a single picture of how they viewed interpreters/Malintzin, she reads them linearly. This method allows her to demonstrate that the first generation focused on the importance of translators and Malintzin  in their pictoral representations of the events. It was only in later generations (those that came after Malintzin had died) that her status was reduced as a result of the general reduction in the need for translators during their period (72-76).

Townsend does a great job capturing the multiplicity of the indigenous experience during the Spanish conquest. She makes clear that there was no single experience demographically or temporally. The close reading of all the available sources and the Nahuatl sources in particular that Townsend employs makes these arguments possible. In addition, it returns agency to both Malintzin and the other indigenous groups that separates the period of the Spanish conquest from the Spanish-Indigenous dichotomy. In its place, a world of a multiplicity of competing autonomous and semi-autonomous interests between various Mexica and Nahua peoples as well as the Spanish develops, in which Malintzin and others like her are competent actors and shaping the outcome along with the Spanish conquerors.