Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

In 1519, when the would-be conquering of Mexico general Hernán Cortés met the indigenous woman known as Marina (or Malinche), no one could predict the result of this encounter between the Spanish and the Indian, man and woman, colonizer and colonized, free and enslaved, dominating discourse and “minority” language. And even today no one is quite certain what exactly this convergence produced, and who seduced whom, and at what price. Entrenched accounts portray Malinche as a betrayer of her own people who facilitated Cortés’s colonization of Mexico and then mothered a race of bastardized mestizos that eventually displaced the “pure” indigenous native population of Mexico. More recently, Chicana feminists have attempted to repossess Malinche as a heroic individual who mitigated violence against her people or as a religious woman dedicated to her own worldview.¹ What is clear is that for many contemporary Chicano/a writers (male and female) Malinche functions as a multivalent sign of their multiple loyalties—the need for both fidelity and betrayal—as cultural translators who must mediate between the U.S. and Mexico, the written and the oral, English and Spanish, a dominant discourse and a “minority” one. Every act of translation, Barbara Johnson argues, must be viewed as both an act of fidelity and infidelity: “The translator ought . . . to be considered not as a duteous spouse but as a faithful bigamist, with loyalties split between a native language and foreign tongue. . . . The bigamist is thus necessarily doubly unfaithful, [End Page 1] but in such a way that he or she must push to its utmost limit the very capacity for faithfulness” (142–43). Malinche instantiates translation’s potential both to be unfaithful to a source text but also to beget a new kind of fidelity that creates something unique from the disparate parts of experience and language that the translator brings into linguistic and cultural contact.

What might draw Sandra Cisneros (in Woman Hollering Creek, 1991), Nash Candelaria (in Memories of the Alhambra, 1977), Richard Rodriguez (in Days of Obligation, 1992), and Cherríe Moraga (in Loving in the War Years, 1983) to interpellate the problematic and much maligned figure of Malinche?² In an influential reading of Malinche called “Traddutora, Traditora,” Norma Alarcón focuses on Malinche as a translator figure in poetry and literary criticism written by women and concludes that in these texts “the story of La Malinche demonstrates that crossing ethnic and racial boundaries does not necessarily free her from ‘violence against herself ’; moreover, once her usefulness is over she is silenced and disappears from the record, precisely because she is an Indian and a woman. She crosses over into a site where there is no ‘legitimated’ place for her in the conqueror’s new order” (86). Yet the four writers I discuss are drawn to Malinche because she suggests, in effect, ways of moving beyond a binary opposition between voice and silence, colonizer and colonized. Malinche was influential because of her ability to speak both Indian (Nahuatl) and Mayan tongues, and her rapid acquisition of Spanish solidified her role as Cortés’s interpreter; she translated between at least three languages. Her choice, then, is not a simple one between silence or voice, faithfulness or betrayal, an indigenous tongue or Spanish; therefore, she cannot easily be allied with either a “pure” indigenous discursive presence or a colonizing voice.

Several literary critics have highlighted Malinche’s attempt to gain agency through mastery of the dominant discourse (Spanish) and apparent abandonment of her “mother” culture; others have scrutinized her endeavor to find power and expression by retention of an indigenous point of view or voice.³ In contrast to these approaches, I argue that Malinche becomes a paradigmatic figure both for male and female contemporary Chicano/a writers because she instantiates the possibility (not always achieved) of finding an interlingual language—a discursive perspective that lies in between Spanish and English languages and worldviews. These writers employ Malinche to facilitate a lexical [End Page 2] state of tension that sometimes produces interlingualism, defined by Juan Bruce-Novoa as the mixing of...