La Malinche and la Llorona as Chicana Archetypes: History, Symbolism, and Influence on Chicana/o Culture and Literature

In traditional Mexican and Chicano/a culture, gender roles have been defined in a skewed, phallocentric way that has severely limited the options of a woman to define herself within the culture.  One figure of Chicano folklore who has been essential in not only defining, but in redefining Chicana gender roles is the Malinche/ Llorona archetype that is derived of both historical fact and folkloric legend. While these legendary figures have helped oppress and devalue women, contemporary Chicanas have begun to claim these figures as role models by re-defining the stories and reshaping the role of women in Mexican and Chicano history and folklore.
The story of La Malinche had been told many ways, and the details of the story vary. Cordelia Candelaria author of  Letting La Lorrona go or re/reading the history’s tender mercies describes a story that “emerge[s] from the era of the Spanish Conquest of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1521.  La Malinche, according to Mary Louise Pratt, author of “Yo soy la Malinche”: Chicana writers and the poetics of ethnonationalism, was a citizen under the rule of Moctezuma, ruler of the Aztecs, from Teticpac and was “of noble birth.” While many versions of the story of La Malinche describe her as being of royal or noble birth, there are also conflicting reports of this detail. Leslie Petty, referencing Rachel Phillips, argues that “although she was from an indigenous Mexican tribe, she was far from royalty” (Petty also reports that she was born in Painala, not Teticpac).
The circumstances under which La Malinche found herself in association with Hernan Cortes, however, have also been debated. In some versions, the young girl “(also known as Dona Marina, Marina, Malinalli, and Malintzin) . . . was given by her chief to assist Hernan Cortes in what resulted in conquest of Mexico in 1519-21” (Canderlaria). In another version of the story derived from the accounts of historian and member of the Cortes excursion Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Marina was born into nobility, but when her father died and her mother remarried and had a son with her new husband, Marina was sold into slavery by her mother to funnel the family inheritance to her newborn son rather than her daughter (Pratt).
Petty reports that she “grew up speaking Nahuatl and was either sold or given away as a child . . . [then was] moved to Tabasco where she learned to speak Mayan.” It was this proficiency in learning languages that would lead la Malinche to become a key historical and subsequently archetypal, figure in the story of the Spanish Conquest of Moctezuma and the Aztec empire.
“Marina was used to provide the missing link by translating the Nahuatl into Mayan . . . [she] soon learned Spanish and became Cortes’s primary translator . . . [thereby] help[ing] him defeat Monteczuma” (Petty). “She,” as Pratt elaborates, “obeying men obeyed her father’s [or chief’s, or master’s, etc] wishes to be given to Cortez and gave him Mexico.” Her help, Pratt reinforces, was undoubtedly “absolutely essential to Cortes’s successions at forging alliances with indigenous groups who opposed Aztec domination.”
While Marina’s role in the historical aspects of the defeat of the Aztecs is clear, her transition from historical figure to archetypal icon stems, apparently, from her personal relationship with Hernan Cortes. According to Petty, “historical writings confirm that Cortes and Marina had a sexual relationship; she gave birth to his son, Martin.” This relationship, when considered along with her role in helping Cortes in his conquest-centered efforts, sow the seeds for an image and stigma that would plague Marina’s name for centuries to come. Pratt poses questions that were imaginably in the minds of Marina’s Aztecs, questions that have been echoed in the minds of generations of Mexicans to come: “Why was she helping them forge an army . . .? Why did she save them from ambushes, attacks, misunderstandings likely to prove her undoing? . . . [W]as she simply a traitor?”
While this sexual relationship between Cortes and Marina certainly denotes treachery in the eyes of many Mexicans, said Mexicans have struggled with the fact that they are, biologically, children of this affair. Pratt points out an assertion made by Octavio Paz: La Malinche, traitor or no, represents “the symbolic mother of the Mexican people. Her illicit relationship with Cortes defined Mexicans as a mestizo people and the illegitimate offspring of colonial rape and/or sexual betrayal.” Therefore, Marina is not only symbolic of treachery, passive femininity, and motherhood simultaneously, but she has in addition been associated with the violated, raped, and dishonored woman.
The legend of la Malinche, more so than the facts of Marina’s life, have contributed in many ways and over many centuries to the overall culture of Mexican and Chicana/o culture and folklore. For example, “the terms malinche and malinchista survive in Mexican vernacular as derisive terms meaning ‘traitor’” (Pratt). Also, these terms have in subsequent years been attributed to women of Mexican or indigenous ancestry who marry out of the race, particularly into the Anglo culture: “the 16th century relation between indigenous woman and Spanish man is ‘read’ onto the 20th century relation between Anglo American man and Mexican American woman” (Pratt). Even more recently, it has been associated with “Chicanas who left the community to seek higher education” or become associated with “feminism” (Pratt).
The Legend of Marina/ la Malinche has also been transposed and weaved into more folkloric mediums of Chicano/a culture, as can be seen in the Mexican folk tale of La Lorrona, the Weeping Woman. The details of the story vary even more so than those of the life of Marina, but every version has the following general story line: it is the story of “ the Weeping Woman who kills (or in some versions abandons) her  children and forever after wanders the world in punishing anguish for her sins” (Candelaria).
The most common version of La Llorona involves a woman who is usually of mestizo or indigenous origin who becomes sexually/ romantically involved with a man, usually of higher social class and of Spanish ancestry and bears his children. In one way or another, due variably to reasons involving social caste and/or infidelity the man leaves/ abandons the woman and her children. In any case, the heart-broken woman, in a fit of what is commonly accepted as insanity, drowns/kills/abandons her children. In some versions, she also commits suicide, in others it is not entirely explained how she makes the transformation into La Llorona. Then, and this detail is definitive in the legend, “[her soul] is condemned to earth to roam, childless and crying in eternal torture for her unpardonable sins” (Candelaria).  
The story of La Llorona has traditionally been used as a cautionary tale aimed toward children. Legend has it, as most children in Mexican and Chicano cultures find out, that La Llorona wanders the earth near bodies of water in search of her lost children, and if she happens to come across a living child who is not her own, she snatches them up as replacements for her own lost babies. The idea is, according to Candelaria, that it teaches children to “repress their sexual longings.”
Rudolfo Anaya agrees that La Llorona as a cautionary tale aims to “teach sexual taboos . . . [and] warn the child not to indulge in sexual practices. . . . Their role is to frighten the young and keep them in within the fold of family, community, and religious dogma.”
The parallels between the stories of Marina and la Llorona have not escaped Chicano/a writers over the course of time. In Fact, Ana Maria Corbonell, author of From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue In Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros asserts that “La Llorona . . . has been linked to the highly denigrated La Malinche [who] was [also] used as a sexual object by the Spanish.” Both stories have traditionally depicted women in the Mexican and Chicana culture as passive, sexual, and violated creatures, dependent on and abused by men. Pratt describes some of the symbolism and connotations commonly derived from both stories as follows: the women are depicted as representing “the passion-driven acts of a woman in love; as the inevitable playing out of female subordination, as revenge on the society that devalued and objectified her . . . [and] as an archetypal manifestation of female treachery and woman’s inconsistency.”
Both women and their stories have also worked to define gender roles for Mexican women and Chicanas. For example, in reference to the fact that “malinche” has become synonymous with “traitor” in Mexican and Chicano/a culture, Pratt points out that “whether committed by a man or woman, betrayal is coded in the language as female. To be a traitor is by implication to become female, while to be a female is to be inherently a potential traitor.” Pratt also points out the juxtaposition of la Malinche to another iconic archetype of Chicana and Mexican culture: “She plays a negative role opposite . . . The Virgin of Guadalupe, the national saint created out of the intersection of Christianity and Aztec religion” (Pratt).  This juxtaposition creates a virgin/whore dichotomy that is prevalent in Mexican and Chicano/a culture that limits women to only two lifestyles and identities, something that contemporary Chicana writers have expressed a desire to change.
The political Chicano movement, like the Chicano and Mexican culture from which it stems, is and has been “masculinist in its conception and tended to unreflectively reproduce the subordination of women. . . [Therefore] Chicana writers often invoke the figure of la Malinche as a vital, resonant site through which to respond to androcentric ethno-nationalism and to claim gendered oppositional identity and history” (Pratt). In their writings, as can be seen from Pratt’s examples of Sosa Riddell’s poetry, they have begun to “not reject the label of la Malinche, but to assume it” (Pratt). Pratt points out that “many poets have sought to reverse the Malinche myth this way.” Referencing Naomi Quinonez, she describes the new myth of la Malinche as “far from betraying her culture, in submitting to Cortes, she was doing exactly what her culture taught her to do. [Quinonez] rescues her from a depressing picture of helplessness . . . [and] restores Malinche to power and agency; from her position as submissive object, she exerted world-historic power.”
In her analysis of Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek, Ana Maria Carbonell has explored the ways in which Cisnero’s has attempted to re-write the story of La Llorona.  In this revision, Cleofilas, the Llorona figure and protagonist, “regains her voice by transforming herself from a stereotypical Llorrona figure, a weeping victim, to a gritona, a hollering warrior.” She, rather than being abandoned by her abusive husband, leaves him, thereby “allowing her to shed her previous illusions that welcomed male dependency. . . . She makes the self-reliant choice to protect herself and her children by leaving him” (Carbonell).
Therefore, Chicanas have begun to redefine the legends of both la Malinche and la Llorona. La Malinche, Marina, is no longer the submissive, violated traitor, but the intelligent, talented, and strategic woman behind the power that was Cortes: she is the “visionary” who united cultures, the mother of the Mexican race (Pratt). La Llorrona, similarly, is no longer the compulsive, irresponsible, insane, selfish, jilted woman who is dependent on a man for happiness, but an independent, brave, matriarchal and protective figure: she has not only saved herself, but her child.

References:
Anaya, Rudolfo. “La Llorona, El Kookooee, and sexuality.” Bilingual Review 17.1 (1992): 50-56. Web.         17 Nov 2010.

Candelaria, Cordelia. “Letting La Lorrona go or re/reading the history’s tender mercies.” Heresies 7.27(1993): 111-116. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.

Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue In Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros” MELUS 24.n2 (1999): 53-74. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.

Petty, Leslie. “The ‘dual’-ing Images of la Malinche and la Virgen de Guadalupe in Cisnero’s The House on Mange Street.” MELUS 25.2 (200): 119-133. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "’Yo Soy La Malinche’:Chicana writers and the poetics of ethnonationalsim.." Callaloo. 16.n4 (1993): 859(15). Gale. NMSU Las Cruces. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.