Malintzin's Choices Essay

Malintzin’s Choices by Camilla Townsend is a novel about a young indigenous woman who was a translator for Hernando Cortes and helped him in dealing with Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor, between 1519 to 1521. Malintzin went by many names including Dona Marina, what the Spanish called her, and La Malinche, which was sort of a slang name that was also insulting. As La Malinche she is known as a traitor against her people and even as a dangerous sexy woman who gave Cortes whatever he wanted but of course for her own interests. However, that’s not necesserilly the case, as her life was very complicated. She was sold into slavery as a child and then again was given away to the Spanish to be a concubine or a woman with a lower status than a wife to a man, and she was a cook. She eventually though rose up and made much more of herself. …show more content…
Townsend utilizes not only her own work and the works of other researchers, but the ever growing research into the Nahuas’ way of living from documents, testaments, land records, songs in Nahuatl, and she uses sources such as James Lockhart’s The Nahuas after the Conquest (1992) to back her up.
Townsend also does a good job of reconstructing Malintzin’s house such as talking about its symmetry, and filling up the heath with images of a griddle, pots, and weaving instruments which were important things in a woman’s life during this time. Townsend also seems to understand the weak position that a slave is put in and the power that the ruler among the Nahuas has. But for Malintzin to go from a slave to a woman with a higher position to demand and a voice is very significant in understanding the native representation of

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