The Aztecs called Cortés by the name of his enslaved interpreter
Sold into slavery as a girl, the Nahua woman later called La Malinche was handed to Spanish invaders in 1519. Her fluency in Nahuatl and Maya made her indispensable, so central that Moctezuma's envoys addressed Hernán Cortés himself as Malinche. In modern Mexico she is seen as traitor, victim, and mother of a nation.
Her birth name is lost. Born around 1500 in a region near the Coatzacoalcos River, probably at Olutla, she likely came from a noble family, since she could handle the formal lordly register of Nahuatl that commoners did not learn. Between the ages of about 8 and 12 she was sold or kidnapped into slavery. Bernal Díaz claimed her mother and stepfather gave her away so a half-brother could inherit, but historians distrust his heavily Christianised telling. Taken to the port of Xicalango and then bought by Chontal Maya traders in Potonchán, she learned Maya there.
After Cortés defeated the Maya at Potonchán, they gave the Spaniards twenty enslaved women, including her. Baptised Marina, she was first assigned to a captain, Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero. Her value became obvious at San Juan de Ulúa, when Moctezuma's emissaries arrived speaking Nahuatl and the Spanish interpreter Gerónimo de Aguilar, who knew only Yucatec Maya, could not follow. A relay formed: Cortés spoke Spanish to Aguilar, Aguilar rendered it in Maya, and Marina turned it into Nahuatl. Among the Totonac a further link was added, and the linguist Frances Karttunen marvelled that anything got communicated at all. Her Spanish nickname was la lengua, the tongue.
She stood at the centre of the alliances that made the conquest possible, and Tlaxcalan pictures of their pact with the Spaniards give her a prominent place. The most notorious episode came at Cholula, where Spanish accounts claim she uncovered a plot, prompting a pre-emptive massacre. Historians such as Ross Hassig and Camilla Townsend suspect that story was invented to justify Cortés to Spanish officials, possibly after he coordinated the attack with Tlaxcalan allies. Cortés took her as his consort, and their son Martín was among the first mestizos of New Spain.
Even her names are tangled. Malintzin comes from Malina, a Nahuatl form of Marina, plus an honorific, and Spaniards may have heard it as Malinche. After Mexico's independence in 1821, writers and painters recast her as a scheming temptress, and today malinchista is an insult for someone disloyal to their own people.
Source: La Malinche
