Malinche Triangulated, Historically Speaking

Malinche Triangulated, Historically Speaking

Deena J. González Rolando Romero and Amanda Harris, eds.

Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche (Houston: Arte Público Press), 2005.

Malinche has not escaped the mythification that besets our studies of Native peoples in the Americas, of the sort Richard Drinnon wrote about long ago, but applied to the Indians Euro-Americans encountered and supposedly conquered. Drinnon reminded us that physical attributes (Montezuma’s long white hair), color, and skin type, but also cultural artifacts, artistic production, beadwork, basketry, and so on were recorded so continuously that by the nineteenth-century Euro-Americans had become hell-bent on eradicating the producers of the very cultural artifacts, assets, attributes that they would ascribe to Native peoples; these ascriptions stretched beyond the attitudinal, that is the attitudes towards Natives carried their own capital, as it were, because through them, whites also ascribed “value;” price, dollars, and the assignment of a value implied that the goods were the remains of “vanquished peoples.” One thing reinforced the other, as we historians who work with stereotypes assert constantly.