Step 4: State of the Question Paper

I don't really have all that much to say about this thing.  I'm really distanced from it now.  Pretty much, Tabetha assigned this and I don't know if I did it right but I did it.  The end.  Am currently working on Octavio Paz!

Understanding Historical Exile through the Role of La Malinche in Myth and Literature

Exploring the presence of La Malinche in myth is difficult without also exploring her role in historical moments.  Since myth and art are often connected to and inspired by historical circumstances, it is important to understand the events that have created the artworks one will be exploring.  This assignment will be analyzing the following three texts in connection with the myth of La Malinche: La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth by Sandra Messinger Cypess, Feminism, Nation, and Myth: La Malinche edited by Rolando Romero and Amanda Nolacea Harris, and “‘Yo Soy La Malinche’: Chicana Writers and the Poetics of Ethnonationalism” by Mary Louise Pratt.  The three texts use various forms of art to explore the role of La Malinche in Mexican history, generally focusing on the post-revolutionary period from 1910 through the 1990s.  

In La Malinche in Mexican Literature, Sandra Messinger Cypess is aiming to explore the evolution of views on La Malinche from the conquest to the modern period: Of the secondary source works so far explored for this research paper, hers is the most broad.  From the work one has done in reference sources, she also seems to be one of the most prominent scholars in the current field of researching La Malinche and other Mexican female historical figures.  In La Malinche in Mexican Literature, Cypess identifies the transformations La Malinche has had throughout her five hundred years in the realms of history and literature.  Cypess claims that “the invasion constituted a clash of cultures involving archetypal patterns that have formed a myth more consequential than the historical reality.”[1]  In the Spanish-dominated society of the pre-revolutionary period, La Malinche was viewed as a Virgin Mary-like mother figure, creating the nation by helping Hernan Cortes to conquer the Mexica in the early sixteenth century.  La Malinche solidified this view of herself as the mother of Mexico when she bore Cortes a son, often viewed as the first mestizo – or mixed race – child of the Spanish and native populations.  Spanish texts acknowledge this great transformation in Malinche at the point of baptism, where she becomes Dona Marina.[2]

From this Spanish view, Cypess moves on to explore how La Malinche was used by the Mexicans to take on the Spanish and gain sovereignty.  “To wrest control of the land from Spain meant dominating the images formed within a Spanish context.”[3]  Here, Cypess begins to survey the place of Malinche as a historical and literary weapon in the struggle of independence in Mexico.  To overturn the Spanish, Malinche had to be overturned.  Malinche’s positive role in the formation of the mestizo nation was turned on its head, and Malinche was “reincarnated as Desirable Whore/Terrible Mother.”[4]  The former biblical image of her as the Virgin Mother was removed and she was now both Eve and the serpent, working together to bring an end to the indigenous populations and promote the dominance of the Spanish. 

Cypess then investigates the writers of the early and mid-twentieth century who used this negative view of Malinche in the formation of Mexican identity after the end of the revolution in 1910.  A more concise study of post-revolutionary writers can be found in Romero and Harris’s Feminism, Nation, and Myth.  Romero and Harris have put together a collection of essays and poetry aimed at constructing and deconstructing the Malinche myth in terms of the Chicano movement of the mid to late-twentieth century.  This collection explores Malinche from a more historical and political view, focusing on how post-independence depictions of Malinche as a traitor were used to keep women in the Chicano movement from incorporating feminism into their revolutionary goals. 

As Harris explains it in the introduction to the text, after the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Mexican Americans began the fight for civil rights.  There was somewhat of a division between those who called themselves ‘Mexican American’ and those who were identified as ‘Chicanos/as.’  As Sandra Cypess explains it, the split fell along political lines: while Mexican-Americans were conservative, Chicanos were more radical and often expressed their views in academic and artistic settings.[5]  The Chicano Movement involved an exploration of Mexican origin as well as some sort of revolutionary planning.  Chicanos appropriated the image of Malinche as a traitor, a woman who led her people into servitude, and actually used her image to suppress the women in their own movement.  In Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche, Amanda Nolacea Harris discusses how the derogatory ideas behind Malinche were used to discourage Chicanas (women in the movement) from attempting to step outside tradition gender norms: “The Movement assigned limited roles to women; the Chicana as faithful follower and sexual partner or nurturing mother figure to the Chicano revolutionary – or ‘the three f’s’ as Cherrie Moaraga articulates it…:’feeding, fighting, and fucking.’”[6] 

However crude, Feminism, Nation and Myth does a great deal of work in deconstructing the use of La Malinche in this significant movement in Mexican American history.  The role of women is well explored in the text, noting the roles that female figures often play in history and ideology while women in the revolution were not allowed to take up high-ranking positions.  The main point of the compilation appears after a preliminary reading to be the amount of agency assigned to the character of Malinche and how that agency translates in the lives of women in the movement over four hundred years later.  The historical and mythical demonization of Malinche seems to stretch into two directions: either she is the chingada, the screwed one, who was used by Cortes to conquer her own people or she is the serpent, knowingly plotting to bring down her people in some sort of revenge scheme.  By assigning negativity to the role of Malinche and then giving that name to any women who stepped outside of the Chicano movement – for instance, those involved in relationships with white men, those seeking to gain an education in white academic settings, or those attempting to join the second-wave feminist movement, largely controlled by middle-class white women – the movement was able to hold on to traditional gender roles in a civil rights movement. 

The role of feminists in the Chicano movement is further explored in Feminism, Nation, and Myth.  The Chicana feminists worked to lift La Malinche out of her assigned role and to assign agency and power to a woman who had been swatted around by men writing history in order to achieve particular goals.  A deeper exploration of the Chicana feminist literature is provided by Mary Louise Pratt in “‘Yo Soy La Malinche’: Chicana Writers and the Poetics of Ethnonationalism.”  Pratt claims that Malinche’s “very presence contradicts…canonical ideologies of conquest and resistance as masculine heroic enterprises, and reductive visions of the conquest as a straightforward relation between victimizers and victims.”[7]  Pratt speaks to the idea that there is a great contradiction in the way the Chicano movement represented La Malinche: both as the chingada and as the traitor.  By assigning the role of the screwed one, tricked by a man into surrendering her nation, blame is put upon a character that completely lacks power and therefore cannot actually be blamed for the downfall of an entire empire.  Pratt writes:

The hostility directed at the figure of La Malinche is seen as a mystification of the fact that the Aztec empire was on the whole overthrown from within.  Obviously Malintzin was only one of tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants of Mexico who collaborated with the Spanish…blaming it all on La Malinche provides a way of leaving intact a manichean…myth of noble Aztec warriors victimized by ruthless Spanish warriors, a myth that proved useful to Mexican nationalism as it developed following the revolution of 1910.[8]

           

The Chicana feminist movement sought to explore Malinche as a character with greater agency and less blame.  Pratt’s piece analyzes the poetry of the movement and how it established La Malinche as a human being with the ability to reason.  The poetry explored often sets up a dichotomy between Malinche and a man – her father or brother or Cortes – and uses this juxtaposition to justify her role in the conquest.  Some of the work directly confronts the idea of La Malinche as a woman used simply to defeat an empire and gives her the power to decide the fate of her own people.

The state of the question of the proposed research paper is: How has the historical exile of La Malinche been significant at certain moments in Mexican-American history?  This exile is mainly expressed through myth and art, often literature, by varying groups and peoples involved in the movement of their time.  The last point in the discussion of Pratt above is particularly important to the proposed paper’s exploration of the historical significance of La Malinche.  In the primary source research in the previous paper - Haniel Long’s La Malinche (Dona Marina) – the role between Malinche and man took on an interesting dependence on the idea of agency.  How does assigning or removing agency from Malinche’s actions affect the portrayal of her and her historical exile?    What points in Mexican-American history and identity require the addition or removal of agency from a historical, but also mythical character, which encompasses all of these roles?  Malinche is the Virgin Mother, Eve, the serpent, Helen of Troy; the list goes on and on.  How does establishing her just as she is, just Malinche or Malintzin or Dona Marina, affect the portrayal of her?  Does she need to be compared to other mythic women in order to carry significance in a historical scope? 

The issue of historical exile and literary exile seem to overlap.  As Cypess says, “La Malinche has been the subject of biographical, fictional, pictorial, and symbolic interpretation.”[9]  The intersection of these various forms of interpretation develops a character that crosses over several disciplines to become a rounded figure in the collective conscious of a specific group of individuals.  Throughout the primary sources available, the place of agency seems to form the character of Malinche and is closely tied to the contemporary historical events.  By aiming to explore these various historical points and the use or misuse of La Malinche in these moments, the paper will aim to understand the politics of historical exile.   

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[1] Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, (Austin, TX: University of Austin Press, 1991,) 1. 

[2] Ibid., 9. 

[3] Ibid. 

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Rolando Romero and Amanda Nolacea Harris, eds., Feminism, Nation, and Myth: La Malinche, (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2005), x. 

[7] Mary Louise Pratt, “‘Yo Soy La Malinche’: Chicana Writers and the Poetircs of Ethnonationalism,” in Callaloo 16:4 (Autumn 1993): 859-873, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2932214 (accessed February 26, 2011), 860. 

[8] Ibid., 861. 

[9] Cypess., La Malinche in Mexican Literature, 2.