La Malinche and me

Last month I visited the Denver Art Museum and toured their exhibit of La Malinche. It was an enlightening retrospective about the history and folklore surrounding her with pieces and narratives reflecting the takes by other artists: visual, theatrical, commercial, and literary. I'll admit some sour grapes here because I wasn't invited to contribute, especially since I'm one of the few writers from the US to feature La Malinche in a novel.

So who is La Malinche? She is famous for serving as a translator to the Conquistador general Hernán Cortés and helping him overthrow the Aztec throne. She was an indigenous woman from the land we know today as Mexico, and as a young girl, taken as a slave. Later she was gifted to the Spaniards, where her talents as a translator were valued by Cortés who used her to negotiate with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and his imperial court. Malinche was not only an expert interpreter but her keen knowledge of local culture and politics allowed Cortés to gain a military advantage over Moctezuma and set into motion the rapid destruction of the Aztec empire.

Because of this, in Mexico "Malinche" is synonymous with "traitor" someone capable of the ultimate betrayal. But over the centuries, and especially more recently, a more complicated appraisal has seeped into popular culture. She is also portrayed as a victim of exploitation and because she bore two children with the Spaniards, a son Martin with Cortés and later, a daughter Maria with her husband Juan Jaramillo (a lieutenant of Cortés), Malinche is regarded by some as the mother of the mestizos, people of mixed Indigenous American and European blood. (If you want to stir the pot, just go to Mexico and ask around what "mestizo" means and you'll get a heated earful about the country's enduring culture of racism. Sound familiar? Colonization on both sides of the border has left one convoluted legacy.) 

Malinche is known by other names such as Malinali, Manitzin, and Doña Marina. In post-colonial Mexico she was again redefined as "La Llorona" (the Crier), the phantom woman who prowls the waterways and lures the unsuspecting to their deaths. Her lamentations seek out her children, whom she drowned in a fit of madness. This myth is that La Llorona is actually Malinche condemned by fate to walk the earth, her children being the Indigenous people she betrayed to the Conquistadors. 

Since the reputation of Malinche is up for grabs, I decided to put my own spin on things. In the second book of my Felix Gomez series, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, we learn that the vampire trickster Coyote was actually her first child. As I was writing that book, I discovered that many Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Edict of Expulsion had joined the Conquistadors to escape the attention of the Inquisition. Acevedo was a popular last name adopted by these Jewish refugees. Drawing on this history, I decided that one of these Spanish Jews had a secret tryst with Malinche, who subsequently gave the baby away, to be raised by a guajiro, turned into a vampire, taught the deepest secrets of the supernatural world, and given the name "Coyote" to serve the undead as an enigmatic and mischievous shaman.

It is as La Llorona that Doña Marina herself appears in my novel, Rescue From Planet Pleasure. To rescue another vampire from the aliens, Felix travels to the sacred ground of Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, where he reunites with Coyote, who's tormented by his mother Doña Marina. Turns out, she's somewhat of a party girl with a friend-with-benefits relationship with El Cucuy, the Mexican bogeyman. And we get to hear her side of the whole "you betrayed Mexico" narrative.