Malinche

Hi there guys! I spent the last week in Tlaquepaque/Guadalajara, in Mexico, as guest to a convention there (COMAGON) it was a really fun time and I meet a lot of people (thanks Adrian, Alfonso and Eder!). One of the questions I got, was if I did an image based in La Malinche ...and Indeed I done this image long time ago, when I was spending time in the hospital, near 2009, so, as was promised, there goes! I hope you like it!

PSCS/bamboo/7hours/music: Hombre de Maiz - Los Calchalkis
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MENSAJE EN ESPAÑOL!
Muchas gracias a todos los amigos que me visitaron en la Comagon, muchas gracias por su simpatia y buena onda. Definitivamente con ganas de volver algun dia
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LET`s WIKIATTACK!!

La Malinche (also known as Malinali or Malintzin) was born in 1496, in a then "frontier" region between the Aztec Empire and the Maya states of the Yucatán Peninsula). She was named "Malinalli" after the Goddess of Grass, and later "Tenepal" meaning "one who speaks with liveliness." In her youth, her father died and her mother remarried and bore a son. Now an inconvenient stepchild, the girl was sold or given to Maya slave-traders from Xicalango, an important commercial town further south and east along and hard the coast. Bernal Díaz del Castillo claims Malinalli's family faked her death by telling the townspeople that a recently deceased child of a slave was Malinalli.

Malinalli was introduced to the Spanish in April 1519, when she was among twenty slave women given by the Chontal Maya of Potonchan (in the present-day state of Tabasco) after the Spaniards defeated them in battle. Her age at the time is unknown; however, assumptions have been made that she was in her late teens or early twenties. Bernal Díaz del Castillo remarked on her beauty and graciousness; she was the only one of the slaves whose name he remembered. (He called her "Marina," the Christian name she took upon being baptized in 1519.) Cortés singled her out as a gift for Alonzo Hernando Puertocarrero, perhaps the most well-born member of the expedition. Soon, however, Puertocarrero was on his way to Spain as Cortés' emissary to Charles V, and Cortés kept her by his side for her value as an interpreter who spoke two native languages—Mayan and Nahuatl.

According to Díaz, she spoke to emissaries from Moctezuma in their native tongue Nahuatl and pointed to Cortés as the chief Spaniard to speak for them. Cortés had located a Spanish priest, Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had spent several years in captivity among the Maya peoples in Yucatán following a shipwreck. Thus, he had learned some Mayan, but he did not speak Nahuatl. Cortés used Marina (her Christian name) for translating between the Nahuatl language (the common language of central Mexico of that time) and the Chontal Maya language. Then Aguilar could interpret from Mayan to Spanish, until Marina learned Spanish and could be the sole interpreter. She accompanied him so closely that Aztec codices always show her picture drawn alongside of Cortés. The natives of Tlaxcala, who formed an alliance with Cortés against Moctezuma, called both Marina and Cortés by the same name: Malintzin. (The -tzin suffix was the Nahuatl equivalent of "sir" or "lady" bestowed on them by the Tlaxcalans.)

According to surviving records, Marina learned of a plan by natives of Cholula to cooperate with the Aztecs to destroy the small Spanish army. She alerted Cortés to the danger and even pretended to be cooperating with her native informants while Cortés foiled their plot to trap his men. Cortés turned the tables on them and instead, slaughtered many Cholulans.

Following the fall of Tenochtitlán in late 1521 and the birth of her son Don Martín Cortés in 1522, Marina stayed in a house Cortés built for her in the town of Coyoacán, 8 miles south of Tenochtitlán, while it was being rebuilt as Mexico City. Cortés took Marina to quash a rebellion in Honduras in 1524–26 when she is seen serving again as interpreter (suggestive of a knowledge of Maya dialects beyond Chontal and Yucatán.) While in the mountain town of Orizaba in central Mexico, she married Juan Jaramillo, a Spanish hidalgo. Historians such as Prescott generally lost track of Marina after her journey to Central America. More contemporary scholars have determined that she died less than a decade after the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan at some point in 1529. Historian Sir Hugh Thomas in his book "Conquest" reports the probable date of her death as 1551, deduced from letters he discovered in Spain alluding to her as alive in 1550 and deceased after 1551. She was survived by her son don Martín, who would be raised primarily by his father's family, and a daughter doña María who would be raised by Jaramillo and his second wife doña Beatriz de Andrada.

For the conquistadores, having a reliable interpreter was important enough, but there is evidence that Malinche's role and influence were larger still. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier who, as an old man, produced the most comprehensive of the eye-witness accounts, the Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España ("True Story of the Conquest of New Spain"), speaks repeatedly and reverentially of the "great lady" Doña Marina (always using the honorific title, "Doña"). "Without the help of Doña Marina," he writes, "we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico." Rodríguez de Ocana, another conquistador, relates Cortés' assertion that after God, Marina was the main reason for his success.

The evidence from indigenous sources is even more interesting, both in the commentaries about her role, and in her prominence in the drawings made of conquest events. In the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (History of Tlaxcala), for example, not only is Cortés rarely portrayed without Malinche poised by his ear, but she is shown at times on her own, seemingly directing events as an independent authority. If she had been trained for court life, as in Díaz's account, her loyalty to Cortés may have been dictated by the familiar pattern of marriage among native elite classes. In the role of primary wife acquired through an alliance, her role would have been to assist her husband achieve his military and diplomatic objectives.

The historical figure of Marina has been intermixed with Aztec legends (such as La Llorona, a woman who weeps for lost children). Her reputation has been altered over the years according to changing social and political perspectives, especially after the Mexican Revolution, when she was portrayed in dramas, novels, and paintings as an evil or scheming temptress. In Mexico today, La Malinche remains iconically potent. She is understood in various and often conflicting aspects, as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or simply as symbolic mother of the new Mexican people. The term malinchista refers to a disloyal Mexican.