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. MALINCHE IN CROSSBORDER HISTORICAL MEMORY Sonia Hernández The opening lines of a recent song by the popular norteño band Los Tigres del Norte exemplify the constant juggling of two cultures by Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the United States: For those who say I am a malinchista and that I betray my flag and my nation, so that boundaries can be broken with my song, I will open my heart to you. I left the tombs of my parents and grandparents. I arrived crying to the land of the anglosaxon . . . don’t call me a traitor because I love my two nations. In the morning I left the dead, here my children were born, for defending my rights I cannot be called a traitor. —Mis Dos Patrias (My Two Homelands)1 For the writers of this song, as for many Mexican Americans who inhabit the border between the two countries, the term malinchista means a traitor, someone who has betrayed their Mexican heritage by participating in the culture of the United States. Yet the songwriter pleads with his fellow fronterizos (the people residing along the border) not to call him a traitor because he loves both countries, the United States and Mexico.2 The popular border term malinchista makes an adjective out of the name Malinche, the indigenous woman given to Hernán Cortés by Mayans. But this song does not refer to her crucial role in the Spanish victory in Mexico. Rather it is the political perception that she betrayed her people by translating for Cortés and helping the invaders. This interpretation emerged in the wake of the Mexican Revolution , whose leaders were hostile to the privileges accorded foreign investors during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Stressing nationalism, twentieth-century political leaders rewrote Mexican history schoolbooks , identifying Spaniards as foreign intruders. In these newly rewrit-  José Limón and La Malinche ten history texts, Malinche became a turncoat because she had aided the invading Spaniards. Once the international boundary was crossed Malinche no longer fit within the confines of the Mexican political understanding. However, the association between Malinche and betrayal remained. In South Texas a malinchista became someone who contravened the local Mexican community ’s cultural norms. A Texas malinchista might be a woman who married a North American man or a man whose friends were English speakers. Yet, having grown up along this border, I knew there were far more perspectives on Malinche than this simple political one, or even on the well-known epithet malinchista.3 Cultural scholars argue for the “possibility of multiple identities and contradictory positions.”4 Historians who focus on the concept of historical memory remind us that recollection evokes the past. “We consciously reconstruct images of the past in the selective way that suits the needs of our present situation,” writes Patrick Hutton.5 Mexican American culture both converges and diverges from the cultures in which it originates. When the Mexican immigrant-turned-artist José Limón crossed the border with his family into the United States as a child, his formal schooling in his Mexican heritage ceased. But that brief exposure did not stop Limón from remembering that history any more than it has stopped generations of Mexican Americans from recalling their earliest memories of Mexico’s past. Most Mexican Americans, however, do not translate that past into great artistic works, as Limón did in La Malinche, Danzas Mexicanas, La Piñata, and Carlota. Unlike the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, which directly reflected Mexican cultural practice, Limón’s vision of Mexico’s past stems from what the Tigres del Norte band describes as the experience of two homelands: the lived experience of Mexican Americans is rooted in two cultures, Mexican and American. Limón’s La Malinche embodied both American and Mexican attitudes toward this controversial woman, and his choreography reflected some of the contradictory attitudes toward Malinche that I heard growing up on the Texas–Mexican border. No longer simply the traitor of conventional twentieth-century Mexican history or its American avatar, the traitor to her culture, she was a half-remembered shadow, but a shadow of a woman whose life was wholly singular. What follows is a border perspective of Malinche, one that derives from the diverse bicultural, binational experiences of two dozen residents along the Texas-Mexican border whom I interviewed for this essay. [3.145.178.240] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11:13...

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