La Malinche was a translator for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortes, serving a vital role in the survival of his expedition. The language barrier between the Spanish that Cortes and his company spoke and the indigenous languages that the native populations of Mesoamerica spoke made the formation of alliances difficult; La Malinche helped to bridge this gap. However, much of La Malinche’s life has been corroded to time as she never recorded any of her personal details, such as her true thoughts or feelings. Consequently, we are left with many conflicting sources; some undermine her importance, classifying her as just a “translator,” while others highlight such importance, claiming that Cortes’ expedition would’ve failed without her. Nonetheless, the sources have enough in common that we can answer the true implicit question, “why did Malinche serve as a translator for Cortes?” Only then will we truly be able to grasp the surface-level questions of who Malinche was, and how we should characterize her from the perspective of historians looking back on Cortes’ conquests some 500 years later. The short answer is, Malinche most certainly played a vital role in Cortes’ conquest, but it was not out of her loyalty to Cortes or his cause, instead, it was for her own survival.
La Malinche played an undoubtedly important part in allowing Cortes’ conquest to succeed, particularly as a translator. Specifically, Bernal Diaz recalls in “The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, “without the help of [Malinche,] we [as in Cortes and his company,] could not have understood the language of New Spain.” Crucially, if Cortes could not have understood the language of New Spain, forming alliances, similar to the one he formed with the Mexica, illustrated by the Florentine Codex - or even the alliance formed with the Tlaxcalans - illustrated by the Lienzo de Tlaxcala - would not have been possible.
However, La Malinche was not always this faithful translator and supporter. Prior to meeting Cortes, La Malinche had lost virtually all control of her life. Specifically, Diaz recalls that Malinche’s parents abandoned their daughter as a little girl, giving her to native Indians living in Xicalango, who passed Malinche on to the people of Tabasco, who then gave her to Cortes. Malinche was even enslaved by the Maya, as Townsend recalls. Effectively, Malinche was not the one in control during her childhood, being tossed from one temporary village to another, and subjected to the control of the Mayan slave keepers.
Rather than leaving Malinche as an enslaved and abandoned child, Cortes gave Malinche a chance at a new life. Under Cortes, Diaz writes, “[Malinche] was a person of the greatest importance and was obeyed without question by the Indians throughout New Spain.” Cortes gave Malinche the option of either being respected by him, his people, and a significant portion of New Spain’s population, or subjected to the control of her old Mayan slave-keepers, an option where Malinche chose the former. Naturally, Malinche would grow faithful to Cortes later on, almost as a show of respect and gratitude to the person who gave her another chance at life.
The implication of this finding is that Malinche was simply a survivor – her survivalist instinct must've been what mandated her to seize an opportunity to work under Cortes rather than under her previous Mayan slave-keeper. At least under him, she would have a stable environment, rather than one that changed with each village she passed through. As a survivor, Malinche was striving to find a way out of her life as an abandoned child, working as a slave. As Townsend summarizes, “for [Malinche] knew that she was simply surviving - as well as she could - the most ordinary of lives.”
Unfortunately, each source seems to examine La Malinche from a specific context or perspective, perhaps the best example of which is Cortes’ “Letter to Charles V.” In Cortes’ letter, he recounts that during his trip to Tlaxcalteca, the city of the Aztecs, Malinche was first alerted by a local Indian woman of a rapidly-approaching ambush from the townspeople, meant to wipe out Cortes and his company. Malinche quickly relayed this to Cortes, giving him ample time to prepare, ultimately saving his expedition. Unfortunately, Cortes fails to name Malinche directly by name, instead only labeling her as “an interpreter,” leaving the reader to ask the crucial question, “why is Malinche not recognized despite Cortes himself revealing how vital she was to the very survival of his expedition?” 7 Perhaps an answer to this is the perspective in which the letter is written, which as the introduction to the letter itself notes, was written to garner Charles V’s - then ruler of Spain - support, meaning that Cortes might be inclined to pull credit from his followers to make himself look more worthy of Charles’ investment. All of this is problematic because as Townsend recalls, “[Malinche] left us no diaries or letters, not a single page.”
The ambiguity in the evidence leaves room for multiple interpretations as to what Malinche’s true incentives were, perhaps that all she did was out of her sheer dedication to Cortes, and his expedition. Indeed, Diaz recalls that Malinche once proclaimed that she “would rather serve… Cortes than anything else in the world, and would not exchange her place to be Cacica of all the provinces in New Spain.” Malinche fiercely declares that she would rather serve Cortes rather than be the Cacica, the leader, of all of New Spain which would’ve granted her enormous power and influence, underlining her fierce loyalty to Cortes. However, this loyalty must have been born out of Malinche’s gratitude to Cortes who gave her a new chance at life, inadvertently binding her to Cortes. In short, although devotion to Cortes and his expedition is a valid point of contention as to Malinche’s loyalty, it was her survivalist instinct that caused it, and so Malinche was not simply a translator, but a survivor striving to find a way out of her life as an abandoned child who was enslaved.
Although La Malinche may have possessed a deep devotion towards Cortes and his cause, it was not that devotion that drove her into Cortes’ company, rather it was her survivalist instinct that urged her to pursue a life under Cortes, rather than being passed along from one village to another or subjected to the control of her Mayan slave-keepers. Unfortunately, La Malinche’s life - including whatever her true intentions may have been - has been eroded to history, since La Malinche herself never recorded a single moment of her life, leaving her legacy in the hands of the writings of those around her, such as Cortes and Diaz, as well as later historians, such as Townsend. Yet none of them express a truly genuine and unbiased record of her life, as they are written from a specific context or perspective. This ambiguity leaves room for multiple possible incentives, such as a pre-existing devotion to Cortes or his cause, however, that devotion was born of a survivalist instinct to gain independent control of her own life. Regardless, it is clear that Malinche ended up playing a crucial role within Cortes’ expedition.