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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2021
This article foregrounds a new interpretation of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, an indigenous-authored source depicting the Tlaxcalteca's role in the conquest of Mexico, from 1519 to 1521. It analyses this document's unique visual portrayal of Malintzin, an indigenous woman who acted as Hernando Cortés's translator during the conquest, amid the battle for the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Challenging the traditional perception of Malintzin as a peaceful mediator, the Lienzo demonstrates that its Tlaxcalan authors saw her as a powerful warrior or conquistadora, who was intricately connected with violent acts of conquest. By contextualizing depictions of Malintzin as a warrior within the wider entanglement of female figures with violence and warfare, this article underscores indigenous perceptions of the conquest and contributes to the wider, critical deconstruction of triumphalist, Eurocentric narratives. With a particular focus on indigenous associations of Malintzin with the Virgin Mary, this article explores the significance ascribed to these two figures by the Lienzo's authors and their city.
This article's findings were first presented as part of my doctoral thesis, ‘“The people from heaven?”: indigenous responses to Europeans during moments of early encounter in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, 1492 – c. 1585’ (University of Leeds, 2018, funded by the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities). I thank my Ph.D. supervisors Anya Anim-Addo and Manuel Barcia, and examiners David Abulafia and Stephen Alford, for their valuable insights and guidance in the development of this research. Thank you, too, to the journal's reviewers for their valuable suggestions, and to my mentors for their ongoing support and encouragement.
1 Karttunen, Francis, ‘Rethinking Malinche’, in Schroeder, Susan, Wood, Stephanie, and Haskett, Robert, eds., Indian women of early Mexico (Norman, OK, 1999), pp. 291–312Google Scholar; Kidwell, Clara S., ‘Indian women as cultural mediators’, Ethnohistory, 39 (1992), pp. 97–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Townsend, Camilla, Malintzin's choices: an Indian woman in the conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque, NM, 2006)Google Scholar.
2 Townsend, Camilla, Fifth sun: a new history of the Aztecs (New York, NY, 2019), pp. 85–90Google Scholar; Restall, Matthew, When Montezuma met Cortés: the true story of the meeting that changed history (New York, NY, 2018), p. 363Google Scholar; Karttunen, ‘Rethinking Malinche’.
3 Jager, Rebecca K., Malinche, Pocahontas, & Sacagawea: Indian women as cultural intermediaries and national symbols (Norman, OK, 2015), p. 53Google Scholar; Kidwell, ‘Indian women’, 99.
4 Townsend, Fifth sun, p. 91; Jager, Malinche, p. 53. ‘Castilian(s)’ has been used as the preferred designation for Spaniards as ‘Castilian’ was more often how the Spaniards in question referred to themselves. Similarly, in Nahuatl alphabetic sources, Spaniards are often referred to as caxtilteca (Castilians) and caxtillan haca (Castilian people). See James Lockhart, We people here: Nahuatl accounts of the conquest of Mexico, i (Berkeley, CA, 1993), p. 14; Restall, When Montezuma met Cortés, p. 204.
5 Wood, Stephanie, Transcending conquest: Nahua views of Spanish colonial Mexico (Norman, OK, 2003), p. 34Google Scholar; Jager, Malinche, p. 53.
6 Navarrete, Federico, ‘La Malinche, la Virgen y la montaña: el juego de la identidad en los codices tlaxcaltecas’, História, 26 (2007), pp. 288–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 300; Wood, Transcending conquest, p. 35; Gordon Brotherston, Painted books from Mexico: codices in UK collections and the world they represent (London, 1995), p. 34.
7 Hernando Cortés, ‘The second letter’, in Anthony Pagden, ed., Letters from Mexico (cartas de relación) (New Haven, CT, 1986), pp. 45–159, at p. 73.
8 Gordon Brotherston, ‘How long did it take the Aztecs to realise that Cortés was not a god?’, Mexicolore (2005), www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-experts/how-long-did-it-take-the-aztecs-to-realise-that-cortes-was-not-a-god; Jeanne Gillespie, Saints and warriors: the Lienzo de Tlaxcala and the conquest of Tenochtitlan (Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 1994), pp. 98–101.
9 Restall, Matthew, ‘The New Conquest History’, History Compass, 10 (2012), pp. 151–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge, 2003); Louise M. Burkhart, The slippery earth: Nahua-Christian moral dialogue in sixteenth-century Mexico (Tucson, AZ, 1989); Miguel León-Portilla, The broken spears: the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico (Boston, MA, 1992); James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the conquest: a social and cultural history of the Indians of Central Mexico, sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (Stanford, CA, 1992); Lockhart, We people here.
10 Townsend, Fifth sun, p. 12.
11 Cecelia Klein, ‘Wild woman in colonial Mexico’, in Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: visual culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. 245–63, at p. 262.
12 Susan Kellogg, Weaving the past: a history of Latin America's indigenous women from the pre-Hispanic period to the present (Oxford, 2005), ch. 1; Caroline Pennock, Bonds of blood: gender, lifecycle and sacrifice in Aztec culture (Basingstoke, 2008); Pennock, Caroline, ‘Women of discord: female power in Aztec thought’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), pp. 275–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: an interpretation (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 217–18.
13 Pennock, Bonds of blood, p. 3; Clendinnen, Aztecs, p. 402; Wood, Transcending conquest, pp. 11–15, ch. 2; Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., Writing without words: alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC, 1994); Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins, eds., Native traditions in the postconquest world: a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 2nd through 4th October 1992 (Washington, DC, 1998); Elizabeth Hill Boone, ‘Writing and recording knowledge’, in Hill Boone and Mignolo, eds., Writing without words, pp. 3–26; Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in red & black: pictorial histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin, TX, 2000); Donald Robertson, Mexican manuscript painting of the early colonial period: the metropolitan schools (New Haven, CT, 1959); Mary Elizabeth Smith, Picture writing from ancient Southern Mexico (Norman, OK, 1973); Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican writing systems: propaganda, myth, and history in four ancient civilizations (Princeton, NJ, 1992); Lockhart, The Nahuas after the conquest, p. 335.
14 Travis Barton Kranz, ‘Sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan pictorial documents on the conquest of Mexico’, in James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Wood, eds., Sources and methods for the study of postconquest Mesoamerican ethnohistory (Eugene, OR, 2007), http://whp.uoregon.edu/Lockhart/index.html; Travis Barton Kranz, ‘Visual persuasion: sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan pictorials in response to the conquest of Mexico’, in Susan Schroeder, ed., The conquest all over again: Nahuas and Zapotecs thinking, writing, and painting Spanish colonialism (Eastbourne, 2010), pp. 41–73.
15 Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, eds., Indian conquistadors: indigenous allies in the conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman, OK, 2007); Matthew Restall, Maya conquistador (Boston, MA, 1998); Florine G. L. Asselbergs, Conquered conquistadors: the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan: a Nahua vision of the conquest of Guatemala (Boulder, CO, 2008). Texas Fragment (digital facsimile), available via Mapas Project (University of Oregon, 2015), https://mapas.uoregon.edu/ltlax. The original is held in the Ex-Stendahl Collection, Benson Latin American Collections, University of Texas Libraries.
16 Kranz, ‘Visual persuasion’, p. 54. See also Hill Boone, ‘Pictorial documents and visual thinking in postconquest Mexico’, in Hill Boone and Cummins, eds., Native traditions in the postconquest world, pp. 149–99, at pp. 158–60; Florine G. L. Asselbergs, ‘The conquest in images: stories of Tlaxcalteca and Quauhquecholteca conquistadors’, in Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian conquistadors, pp. 65–101; Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the sixteenth century (Stanford, CA, 1967), pp. 158–69, passim.
17 Huamantla Roll or Códice de Huamantla, fragment 6, available via Codíces de México digital exhibition (Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia, 2014), www.codices.inah.gob.mx. See also European accounts, for example Cortés, ‘The second letter’, p. 58.
18 Gillespie, Saints and warriors, pp. 25–6; Elizabeth Aguilera, ‘Malintzin as a visual metaphor in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala’, Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, 7 (2014), pp. 8–24.
19 Lienzo de Tlaxcala (digital recreation), Mesolore (Brown University), www.mesolore.org/viewer/view/2/Lienzo-de-Tlaxcala; Lisa Bakewell and Byron E. Hamann, ‘Introduction to the Lienzo de Tlaxcala’, Mesolore, www.mesolore.org/tutorials/learn/19/Introduction-to-the-Lienzo-de-Tlaxcala-/54/History-and-Publications.
20 Diego Muñuz Camargo, Descripción de la ciudad y provincial de Tlaxcala de la Nueva España (c. 1580–5), Glasgow Hunter MS 232, University of Glasgow Special Collections; Barton Kranz, ‘Visual persuasion’ and ‘Sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan pictorial documents’, passim.
21 See Tepetlan Codex, in Robert Wauchope, ed., Handbook of Middle American Indians, xiv (Austin, TX, 1975), pp. 206–7; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, ‘Book XII: the conquest of Mexico’ (1577), fo. 26r, scene 44; fo. 29v, scene 51; and fo. 44r, scene 94, contributed to the World Digital Library by the Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, www.wdl.org/en/item/10623/view/1/1/.
22 Stephanie Wood, ‘Contextualizing Malinche’, A Contracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America, 4 (2007), p. 220; Restall, When Montezuma met Cortés, pp. 208–11; Townsend, Malintzin's choices, pp. 80–2; Jeanne Gillespie, ‘Malinche: fleshing out the foundational fictions of the conquest of Mexico’, in Elizabeth Moore Willingham, ed., Laura Esquivel's Mexican fictions (Eastbourne, 2010), pp. 173–96, at pp. 173–4; Pilar Godayol, ‘Malintzin/La Malinche/Dona Marina: re-reading the myth of the treacherous translator’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 18 (2012), pp. 61–76.
23 Townsend, Malintzin's choices, p. 3.
24 Amy G. Remensnyder, La conquistadora: the Virgin Mary at war and peace in the Old and New Worlds (Oxford, 2014), p. 279.
25 Cortés, ‘The second letter’, p. 106; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, ‘Book XII’.
26 Remensnyder, La conquistadora, pp. 276–7. See also Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: the Virgin Mary in early colonial Nahuatl literature (Albany, NY, 2001), p. 3; Linda B. Hall, Mary, mother and warrior: the Virgin in Spain and the Americas (Austin, TX, 2004), p. 110.
27 Burkhart, Before Guadalupe, p. 1; Fernando Cervantes, The devil in the New World: the impact of diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT, 1994), p. 54; Catherine DiCesare, Sweeping the way: divine transformation in the Aztec festival of Ochpaniztli (Boulder, CO, 2009); Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, passim.
28 Rolena Adorno, qu. in Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, p. 12.
29 Townsend, Malintzin's choices, p. 78: ‘The reverential form of the name “María” before the r sound was familiar would have been “Malitzin” – which, in a world where an n was often silent at the end of a syllable, could easily have been heard in the same way as “Malintzin”.’
30 Ibid., p. 79.
31 Ibid., p. 78.
32 Navarrete, ‘La Malinche’, pp. 296–300. See also Barton Kranz, ‘Visual persuasion’, pp. 41–73.
33 Navarrete, ‘La Malinche’, p. 291; Remensnyder, La conquistadora, p. 286.
34 Barton Kranz, ‘Visual persuasion’, p. 60; Gillespie, Saints and warriors, pp. 49, 116.
35 Navarrete, ‘La Malinche’, pp. 300, 302.
36 The original Mapa de San Antonio Tepetlan is held in the American Museum of Natural History. Townsend, Malintzin's choices, pp. 66–7; Brotherston, Painted books, pp. 33–4; Wood, Transcending conquest, pp. 33–4. Codex Coyoacán (c. 1560), Mexicain 374, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothéque nationale de France, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10508374m/f4.image. See also Diel, Lori Boornazian, ‘The spectacle of death in early colonial New Spain in the Manuscrito del aperreamiento’, Hispanic Issues on Line, 7 (2010), pp. 144–63Google Scholar.
37 Navarrete, ‘La Malinche’, pp. 288, 301.
38 Hamann, Byron E., ‘Object, image, cleverness: the Lienzo de Tlaxcala’, Art History, 36 (2013), pp. 518–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 535.
39 Remensnyder, La conquistadora, passim.
40 Amy G. Remensnyder, ‘The colonization of sacred architecture: the Virgin Mary, mosques, and temples in medieval Spain and early sixteenth-century Mexico’, in Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein, eds., Monks and nuns, saints and outcasts: religious expression and social meaning in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2000), pp. 202–4.
41 Ibid., pp. 202–3; Remensnyder, La conquistadora, pp. 32–4.
42 Manuscript from the Order of Santa María de España (1273), qu. in Remensnyder, La conquistadora, p. 52.
43 Mark Fryar, Some chapters in the history of Denby (Denby, 1934), p. 18.
44 Remensnyder, ‘Sacred architecture’, p. 195; Remensnyder, La conquistadora, pp. 27–9. William Christian suggests that the location of Marian shrines reflects the wider context of the Reconquest: William Christian, Local religion in sixteenth-century Spain (Princeton, NJ, 1981), pp. 122–7.
45 Remensnyder, ‘Sacred architecture’, p. 195.
46 Angus MacKay, ‘Religion, culture, and ideology on the late medieval Castilian–Granadan frontier’, in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay, eds., Medieval frontier societies (Oxford, 1989), pp. 217–43, at p. 230.
47 Remensnyder, La conquistadora, p. 87.
48 Mary Rubin, Mother of God: a history of the Virgin Mary (London, 2009), p. 386.
49 Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, p. 45.
50 Christopher Columbus, The diario of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to America, 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, transcribed and translated into English with notes and a concordance of the Spanish by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr (Norman, OK, 1991), ‘Monday 15 October 1492’, p. 79, and ‘Tuesday 25 December 1492’, p. 279.
51 Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, p. 57; Remensnyder, ‘Sacred architecture’, p. 207; Remensnyder, La conquistadora, pp. 244–5. For conquistadors’ personal devotion to Mary, see Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, pp. 45–8; Remensnyder, La conquistadora, pp. 209–10.
52 Rubin, Mother of God, p. 387; Remensnyder, Amy G., ‘Christian captives, Muslim maidens, and Mary’, Speculum, 82 (2007), pp. 642–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 646. The image of the Virgin appeared on Cortés's own standard, too: see Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, p. 61; Remensnyder, La conquistadora, p. 254.
53 Pennock, Bonds of blood, pp. 36–8, 41–61; Clendinnen, Aztecs, ch. 7, pp. 246–54; Louise M. Burkhart, ‘Mexica women on the home front: housework and religion in Aztec Mexico’, in Schroeder, Wood, and Haskett, eds., Indian women in early Mexico, pp. 25–54, at p. 26.
54 Gillespie, Saints and warriors, pp. 52–3, 99.
55 Townsend, Malintzin's choices, pp. 81–3, at p. 82; Restall, When Montezuma met Cortés, pp. 210–11.
56 Wood, ‘Contextualizing Malinche’, p. 220.
57 Ibid., p. 232; Kellogg, Weaving the past, p. 56.
58 Brotherston, Painted books, p. 37; Gillespie, ‘Malinche’, p. 175.
59 Hamann, ‘Object, image, cleverness’, p. 535.
60 Scene 29 is the first of two ‘centres’ of the Lienzo (the ‘Tlaxcalan centre’), the other being scene 42 (the ‘Tenochtitlan centre’). For Hamann, scene 29 divides the Lienzo in terms of gender (feminine/masculine), and scene 42 does so by colouration (whiter/greener and yellower): Hamann, ‘Object, image, cleverness’, pp. 529–30, at pp. 534–5.
61 Ibid., p. 535. See also Gillespie, Saints and warriors, p. 101.
62 Hamann, ‘Object, image, cleverness’, p. 535.
63 Lienzo de Tlaxcala, scenes 2–8, 11, 27–9, and 48.
64 Ibid., scenes 14, 15, 21, 22, 26, and 45.
65 Gillespie, Saints and warriors, pp. 98, 107. This is part of Gillespie's broader argument that Malinztin and Cortés may be considered as a representation of Ometeotl: pp. 97–100.
66 Ibid., p. 99.
67 Kellogg, Weaving the past, p. 24; Aguilera, ‘Malintzin as a visual metaphor’, pp. 16–17.
68 Durán, Diego, The Aztecs: the history of the Indies of New Spain, trans. notes, with by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (New York, NY, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. xxxiv, p. 260. For a pictorial depiction of the events, see Juan de Tovar, Tovar Codex (1584), fo. 101, held at the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI), and available digitally via the World Digital Library, www.wdl.org/en/item/6759/#q=tovar&qla=en. The Tovar Codex is based upon Durán's work, as well as on correspondence Tovar had with José de Acosta.
69 Klein, Cecelia, ‘Fighting with femininity: gender and war in Aztec Mexico’, in Trexler, Richard, ed., Gender rhetorics: postures of dominance and submission in history (Binghamton, NY, 1994), pp. 107–46Google Scholar, at p. 109.
70 Klein, ‘Fighting with femininity’, p. 109.
71 Pennock, ‘Women of discord’, p. 290; Burkhart, ‘Mexica women on the home front’, p. 35.
72 Burkhart, ‘Mexica women on the home front’, pp. 37–8.
73 Ibid., pp. 35–9.
74 Klein, ‘Fighting with femininity’, p. 135; Burkhart, ‘Mexica women on the home front’, p. 35.
75 Durán, Diego, Book of the gods and rites and the ancient calendar, ed. and trans. by Horcasitas, Fernando and Heyden, Doris (Mexico City, 1970), p. 231Google Scholar. For a pictorial depiction of Toçi, see The book of the life of the ancient Mexicans, an anonymous Hispano-Mexican manuscript preserved at the Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Florence, Italy, reproduced in facsimile, with introduction, translation, and commentary by Zelia Nuttall (Berkeley, CA, 1903), scene 27, fo. 39. See also DiCesare, Sweeping the way, ch. 4.
76 Don Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, ‘Crónica mexicana’, as discussed in Klein, ‘Fighting with femininity’, p. 109.
77 Townsend, Malintzin's choices, p. 75.
78 Aguilera, ‘Malintzin as a visual metaphor’, p. 14.
79 Burkhart, ‘Mexica women on the home front’, p. 45.
80 Pennock, Bonds of blood, pp. 10–13.
81 Klein, ‘Fighting with femininity’, p. 115.
82 Ibid., p. 140.
83 Ibid., p. 117; Pennock, ‘Women of discord’, p. 276.
84 Burkhart, ‘Mexica women on the home front’, p. 35; Pennock, ‘Women of discord’, p. 283.
85 Gillespie, Saints and warriors, p. 97.
86 Pennock, ‘Women of discord’, p. 298.
87 Wood, Transcending conquest, p. 34; Brotherston, Painted books, p. 33; Townsend, Malintzin's choices, pp. 2–3; Karttunen, ‘Rethinking Malinche’, pp. 296–7; Jager, Malinche, ch. 5, pp. 159–210.
88 Kidwell, ‘Indian women’, p. 98.
89 Ibid., p. 98.
90 Els Maeckelberghe, qu. in Hall, Mary, mother and warrior, p. 16.