Doña Marina

Cortés mentions doña Marina just twice in his reports to Spain and only once by name. Her presence and services are acknowledged, however, in the biography written decades after the Conquest by López de Gómara, who — not having been present himself — apparently relied principally on Cortés for information. In a yet later account of the Conquest, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who had been present, gave her a heroic central role. Other references to doña Marina's part in the Conquest are to be found in requests for pensions (probanzas) submitted to the king of Spain by her daughter and grandson and by aging conquerors and their children. These documents maximize doña Marina's services and the petitioners' proximity to her by descent or attachment. Indigenous artists of the sixteenth century created a pictorial record of her career. She appears in nine illustrations in Blog 12 of the Florentine Codex, a bilingual NahuatlSpanish encyclopedia of indigenous Mexico compiled under the direction of Bernardino de Sahagún. Short of time, the artists were unable to complete their work and left blank spaces toward the end. Otherwise they might have drawn her yet again, because the concluding article recounts her interrogation of the surviving defeated Mexica (Aztec) leaders on behalf of Cortés.
The city council of Tlaxcala commissioned a pictorial record, known as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, of their alliance with Cortés against Moteuczoma and his allies. In its 87 scenes doña Marina appears repeatedly. The fragmentary earliest version consists of just four scenes, in all of which she interprets for Cortés in Tlaxcala. Trusted essay writing online.Order assistance by Custom essay writers. Custom essays of academic quality! Other early indigenous drawings of doña Marina and Cortés are to be found in the Codex Azcatitlan, the Relación de Michoacán, the Tepetlan Codex, the Coyoacán Codex, and the Libro de los gobernadores de Cuauhtinchan. Indigenous artists invariably represented doña Marina dressed in huipilli and cueitl (decorated blouse and skirt), the Nahua woman's proper clothing. Although she appears with loose hair in the Tlaxcalan drawings, she is represented with the distinctive horned hairstyle of Mexica matrons in the Florentine Codex. In neither visual representation nor text is moral disapproval expressed. On the contrary, doña Marina's name is unfailingly accorded the honorific suffix -tzin, Malintzin being the Nahuatl equivalent of doña Marina.
There is no evidence that prior to her Christian baptism she bore a calendrical name including the day sign Malinalli (a type of grass), as often is assumed. The form Malin-tzin follows naturally from the assimilation of Spanish Marina to Nahuatl pronunciation, in which Itypically replaces r. The word tenepal, sometimes asserted to have been her lineage name, appears to be a Nahuatl translation of her Spanish designation as lengua (interpreter): tentli (lip); tene (lip-possessor, one who speaks vigorously); -pal (by means of); tenepal (by means of having lips, of being a vigorous speaker). Hence the elements of the Nahuatl Malintzin tenepal correspond to those of Spanish doña Marina la lengua.