Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2017 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2017 Woman as Dialect: La Malinche in the Construction and Re- Construction of Post-Colonial Mexican Identity Natalie Irene Schuman Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Schuman, Natalie Irene, "Woman as Dialect: La Malinche in the Construction and Re-Construction of Post- Colonial Mexican Identity" (2017). Senior Projects Spring 2017. 342. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2017/342 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Woman as Dialect: La Malinche in the Construction and Re-Construction of Post-Colonial Mexican Identity Senior Project Submitted to The Divisions of Multidisciplinary Studies and Languages and Literature of Bard College by Natalie Schuman Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2017 It seems that after 20,000, I am out of words. I’ll be brief. Thank you For teaching me new ways of seeing, Nicole Caso, Peter Filkins, Tom Keenan, Peter Rosenblum, Robert Weston, Mary Whittemore. For unending support, Mom, Dad, Em, For being dear to me and letting me be dear to you, Angel, Emma, Emmet, Freddy, Jake, Lydia, Mandy, Meghan, Rob, Sean, Tash. Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………….……………………………1 Part 1: La Malinche in History and Myth ……………………………………………….………19 Interlude on Translation ….……………………………………………………….……………..42 Part 2: Chicana Re-Imaginings of La Malinche …………………………………….…………..57 Bibliography .……………………………………………………………………………………72 1 Introduction “Her first step is to take inventory [...] She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of [...] She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 83). The historical and symbolic figure of La Malinche, (also known as Malintzin, Malinal Tenepal and Doña Marina) an indigenous slave who became Cortés’s translator and lover, has been warped countless times to fit shifting political agendas and national identities in post-colonial Mexico. The multitude of reductive meanings that La Malinche has come to signify include, but are not limited to, interpreter, mediator, traitor, misguided and exploited lover, whore, and sell out. Her name has been transformed into an insult, Malinchista, now officially listed in Spanish dictionaries and used commonly in Mexican Spanish, means traitor. Despite the little historical information available about the infamous figure, historians, writers, artists, and politicians have appropriated her legacy countless times in an attempt to articulate Mexican national identity. What historical information we do know for sure about La Malinche comes to us mostly from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, written in 1517. La Malinche was born in 1502 in Coatzacoalcos to an Aztec chief, giving her more access to education than most. After the death of her father, her mother remarried and sold Malintzin to nomadic traders in order to gain her inheritance for the son she bore by her second marriage. Malinche was eventually sold by the traders to the ruling cacique of Tabasco, where she lived until Cortés’s arrival in 1519. Upon his 2 arrival in Tabasco, the cacique gave Malintzin to Cortés along with 19 other women to serve as domestic slaves upon the Spaniards’ conquest. Malintzin’s role quickly changed from domestic and sexual servant to indispensable aide as her knowledge of the country, its native customs and two of its native languages (Mayan and Nahuatl) became known to Cortés and his men. La Malinche acted as a translator, adviser and perhaps lover to Cortés, with whom she bore a child. As a convenient representation of conflicting loyalties and intersectional identities, La Malinche has taken many symbolic forms. She has become the embodiment of the Mexican identity struggles between indigenous and Spanish influences, and the particularities of her mode of survival have been largely ignored in favor of a simplification into a symbol that serves the political agenda of the work in which she appears. An analysis of the ways in which the figure of La Malinche, along with her symbolic counterpart the Virgin of Guadalupe, have been appropriated in foundational works of literature and art throughout Mexican history sheds light on broader trends regarding the objectification of women. In understanding La Malinche as a semiotic object through which writers, artists and politicians articulate their own personal national identity, I hope to reveal a masculinist impulse within linguistic, historical and artistic tradition to use the symbol of the woman as a channel through which the author articulates his own identity. In this way, I will argue that the symbol of the woman operates as language does. Her various conventional definitions (whore, mother, intermediary, virgin, are several of those explored in this paper) combine to form a system of symbols that the masculine author has at his disposal. Just as language offers 3 him a glossary of signifiers through which he can work out and articulate his inner thoughts, feminine archetypes can be utilized to verbalize his interiority. Within these parallel modes of expression, both language and the symbol of the feminine are intermediaries between one’s experience and the articulation of that experience. Language as intermediary If we think of language simplistically, as a system of symbols and sounds in which each sign substitutes for or denotes a direct experience, we see that language is an intermediary mechanism through which meaning is deferred. In this sense, language itself is a process of translation, from actual meaning to a linguistic sign. Octavio Paz, in his canonical essay “Translation: Literature and Letters” writes, “language is already a translation - first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase” (154). So if language is a translation from direct experience to the articulation of that experience which allows one to share it with others, what comes before language? Before a child can speak our language, she relates to her experiences and the objects around her in a relatively unmediated way. Once she moves from the “nonverbal” to the verbal world, she makes her formal entrance into culture, as her modes of observation and expression are regulated by her culture’s language. In this way, language is the intermediary between her natural, unmediated state and her participation as an agent of her culture. Therefore, language can be seen as an intermediary between nature and culture. Language helps to mediate between nature and culture by creating a common plane of understanding between its speakers. In his essay “The Nature of Language,” 4 linguist Edward Sapir explains language’s productive power in that “once the form of a language is established it can discover meanings for its speakers which are not simply traceable to a given quality or experience itself but must be explained to a large extent as the projection of potential meanings into the raw material of experience” (10). He proposes that there is a man who has only seen one elephant in his life, yet is able to speak without hesitation about ten elephants or two elephants walking side by side or a herd of elephants. In this example the speaker is able to analyze his experience (which consists of only one elephant) into dissociable elements in order to transcend the immediately given in his experience (one elephant) and create a world of the potential integrating with the actual (a herd of elephants), thus transcending his reality through language. Sapir argues that this imaginary space created by language is what makes up culture. Instead of existing within nature where only one elephant exists, language allows its speakers to transcend nature and occupy this imaginary linguistic realm (culture). In this way, language is the conquering agent of culture. It takes that which is immediately given, nature, and transcends it, even subjugating it to its will. A compelling example of language’s ability to conquer is the concept of “mother earth.” Without language, man could never overpower nature in all of its power and beauty. By putting a name to the insurmountable force of the earth, language allows man to simultaneously control and transcend the concept of the natural world. And he does so with the symbol of the feminine. Naming allows the concept of nature to be controlled, precisely by gendering it as a concept that can and should be possessed (woman). Nature is no longer an unpredictable and impenetrable force, now she is simply a woman. She is our mother and she loves us. No matter how scary her storms, how 5 debilitating her droughts, how tumultuous her seas, she is on our side. This is a linguistic fallacy, the natural world does not love us like a mother her child, she is ambivalent towards us. But language offers man the opportunity to control that which he cannot feasibly do with his body alone. Language conquers nature’s storms, droughts and seas and this imagined linguistic power becomes real as language builds around it a culture and a system of belief that perpetuates the fallacy of our strength.