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53 Chapter 4 How to Read La Malinche I n the modern world, the question of national identity has occupied a central position in political life. This is especially true in Latin America, where the states that emerged after Independence faced the challenge of creating unified nations out of highly diverse populations living within artificially-drawn political boundaries. Writers and intellectuals throughout the continent contributed to the nation-building project by inventing narratives that would explain the sources of their identity to the citizens of the new states. There is perhaps no better example of the role of literature in the forging of a national identity than the huge body of work centered on La Malinche, the indigenous woman who acted as interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Conquest of Mexico. But the enormous diversity of interpretations developed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of La Malinche’s life is also symptomatic of the sheer difficulty of the task of using literature for the purpose of nation-building, and of the unresolved nature of the question of identity in Mexico. Traditional nationalist versions of La Malinche’s story can be divided into three principal tendencies. In the nativist or indigenist reading, the roots of postIndependence Mexico are traced back to pre-Hispanic times, and La Malinche is branded a traitor to her people. In the mestizophile interpretation of the story, La Malinche is viewed primarily as the mother of the first mestizo (her son Mart ín, whose father was Cortés), and therefore as the symbolical progenitor of the Mexican race. In the conservative Hispanophile view, La Malinche is celebrated for having aided the Spaniards in bringing Christianity to the New World. I will provide an overview of these three paradigms in the first part of this chapter. Although each tendency has its own distinctive view of Mexican culture and identity, these different conceptions occasionally shade into each other. All three paradigms rely on homogeneous notions of “nation,” “race,” and “people.” The fascination with La Malinche has continued unabated in recent decades. In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that the number of writings devoted to the story of her life has increased, in part as a result of the rise of feminist criticism and its reassessment of the role of women in history. The internationalization of La Malinche’s fame is also noteworthy, with new fictional versions of her story published by writers from France, Colombia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in addition to the rewritings that continue to 54 Gunshots at the Fiesta come out of Mexico. In the second part of this chapter, I will examine some of the alternative ways of looking at La Malinche that have emerged since the 1970s, with a particular focus on interpretations that approach her as a woman struggling to survive in a concrete historical situation rather than as the embodiment of abstract historical or political categories. Because they distance themselves from the overwhelming preoccupation with national identity evident in the majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century rewritings of La Malinche’s story, I will label this new tendency “post-nationalist.” The rise of alternative approaches to La Malinche’s role in Mexican history has not, however, spelled the end of nationalist interpretations. In the final section of this chapter, I will offer a detailed comparison of two recent works that center on La Malinche: Amor y conquista [Love and conquest] (1999) by Marisol Martín del Campo and La Malinche (2000) by Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda. While Martín del Campo’s novel offers a painstaking and highly realistic (though obviously fictionalized) reconstruction of La Malinche’s life, focusing on the cultural and psychological crisis caused by the clash between Spanish and indigenous civilizations both during and after the Conquest, Rascón Banda’s play features a turbulent mix of avant-garde, anti-realist techniques and nationalist thematics. With the help of the narratological concept of “backshadowing” developed by Michael André Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson, I draw a contrast between Rascón Banda’s teleological reading of the Malinche story and Mart ín del Campo’s efforts to capture the open-endedness and unpredictability of historical experience. Both works engage with questions of race and nation; I will argue, however, that Martín del Campo’s novel, in not allowing itself to be confined by present-based ideological agendas, creates a more resonant, complex , and truthful (though not necessarily historically...

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