(FUVEST - 2024)The main players in the SpanishAzte

(FUVEST - 2024)

The main players in the Spanish–Aztec War (1519–21) are well known: Hernán Cortés and Montezuma. Lesser-known, though no less important, is a multilingual exiled Aztec woman who was enslaved, then served as a guide and interpreter, then became Cortés’s mistress. She was known as Doña Marina, and as La Malinche.

Scholar and researcher Cordelia Candelaria writes: her paramount value to the Spaniards was not merely linguistic. She was an interpreter/liaison who served as a guide to the region, as an advisor on native customs and beliefs, and as a strategist.

La Malinche was the daughter of an Aztec cacique (chief). This gave her an unusual level of education, which she would later leverage as a guide and interpreter for the Spanish. Throughout Cortés’s travels, she became indispensable as a translator, not only capable of functionally translating from one language to the other, but of speaking compellingly, strategizing, and forging political connections.

Integral as she was to Spain’s success, La Malinche is a controversial figure. Candelaria quotes T. R. Fehrenbach as saying, “If there is one villainess in Mexican history, she is La Malinche. She was to become the ethnic traitress supreme.” But Candelaria argues that La Malinche’s act of turning her back on her own people makes more psychological sense when we consider that, at a young age, she had been sold by her own mother into slavery. Candelaria asks, “What else could this outcast from the Aztecs, ‘her own people,’ have done?”

Disponível em https://daily.jstor.org/. Adaptado.

 

Segundo o texto, em relação à imagem de La Malinche como traidora do povo Asteca, a pesquisadora Cordelia Candelaria argumenta que a intérprete