Jesus Helguera "Malinche" Mexican Calendar Girls Print 16 x 20 Inches

Jesus Helguera "Malinche" Mexican Calendar Girls Print 16 x 20 Inches

La Malinche (c. 1496 or c. 1505 – c. 1529, some sources give 1550), known also as Malintzin, Malinali or Doña Marina, was a woman (almost certainly Nahua) from the Mexican Gulf Coast, who played an active and powerful role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, acting as interpreter, advisor and intermediary for Hernán Cortés. She was also a mistress to Cortés and gave birth to his first son, who is considered one of the first Mestizos (people of mixed European and indigenous American ancestry). 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. She is often known by the pejorative term "La Chingada" (meaning somewhat like a traitor).

There is little certain information regarding Malinche's background. Most of what is reported about her early life comes through the reports of Cortés' "official" biographer (Francisco López de Gómara), and some of Cortés' contemporary conquistadores, such as Andrés de Tapia and (most importantly) Bernal Díaz del Castillo, whose vibrant chronicles Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España relate much of what is known. His version of her origin is a colorful story that seems far too romantic to be entirely credible, yet there is no evidence to the contrary.

According to Díaz, Malinche was the noble first-born child of the lord of Paynala (near present-day Coatzacoalcos, then a "frontier" region between the Aztec Empire and the Maya states of the Yucatán Peninsula). 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 the coast. Díaz claims Malinche's family faked her death by telling the townspeople that a recently deceased child of a slave was Malinche. At some point, she was given or sold again, and was taken to Potonchan, where she was ultimately given to the Spaniards.