Camilla Townsend - Malintzins Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Diálogos Series)

MALINTZINS CHOICES

A series of course-adoption books on Latin America

Independence in Spanish America: Civil Wars, Revolutions, and Underdevelopment (revised edition)Jay Kinsbruner, Queens College

Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho CaudillosJohn Charles Chasteen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de JesusRobert M. Levine, University of Miami, and Jos Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy, University of So Paulo

The Countryside in Colonial Latin AmericaEdited by Louisa Schell Hoberman, University of Texas at Austin, and Susan Migden Socolow, Emory University

Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican IdentityJeffrey M. Pilcher, The Citadel

The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin AmericaEdited by Lyman L. Johnson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Carleton University

The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin AmericaThomas F. OBrien, University of Houston

Tangled Destinies: Latin America and the United StatesDon Coerver, Texas Christian University, and Linda Hall, University of New Mexico

Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and WarMark Wasserman, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial MexicoRichard Boyer, Simon Fraser University

Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness Under Spanish Rule,15321825Kenneth J. Andrien, Ohio State University

The Mexican Revolution, 19101940Michael J. Gonzales, Northern Illinois University

Quito 1599: City and Colony in TransitionKris Lane, College of William and Mary

Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the PresentEdited by Mariano Plotkin, CONICET (National Council of Scientific Research, Argentina), and Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global PerspectiveSuzanne Austin Alchon, University of Delaware

The Silver King: The Remarkable Life of the Count of Regla in Colonial MexicoEdith Boorstein Couturier, Ph.D., Professor Emerita

National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular DanceJohn Charles Chasteen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and IdentityLinda A. Curcio-Nagy, University of Nevada at Reno

The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-PeruvianMystic, Ursula de JessNancy E. van Deusen, Western Washington University

Dutras World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de JaneiroZephyr L. Frank, Stanford University

Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin AmericaEdited by Lyman L. Johnson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 MexicoElaine Carey, St. Johns University

Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society,15001600Karen Vieira Powers, Arizona State University

Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin AmericaEdited by Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Mexico OtherWise: Modern Mexico in the Eyes of Foreign ObserversEdited and translated by Jrgen Buchenau, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Local Religion in Colonial MexicoEdited by Martin Austin Nesvig, University of Miami

SERIES ADVISORY EDITOR :

Lyman L. Johnson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

FRONTISPIECE: Map from the Relacin de Tabasco, 1579. Although a Spaniard named Melchor de Alfaro Santa Cruz sent the map to the Crown, its style suggests an indigenous origin. The original is an impressive fifty-seven by sixty centimeters. Coatzacoalcos appears on the right. Ministerio de Cultura, Archivo General de Indias, Mapas y Planos, Mxico 14.

Malintzins Choices

An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

Camilla Townsend

2006 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved.

Published 2006

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Townsend, Camilla, 1965
Malintzins choices: an Indian woman in the conquest of Mexico / Camilla Townsend.
p. cm. (Dilogos Series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8263-3405-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8263-3405-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Marina, ca. 1505ca. 1530. 2. MexicoHistoryConquest, 15191540. 3. Indians of MexicoFirst contact with Europeans. 4. Indian womenMexicoBiography. I. Title.
II. Series: Dilogos (Albuquerque, N.M.)
F1230.M373T69 2006
972.02092dc22
[B]
2006011933

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-3406-0

TO LOREN AND CIAN

: Chalcacihuacuicatl: Chalca Womans Song

Chapter Illustrations from the Florentine Codex

I have had this project in mind for many years and have worked on it betwixt and between, accruing many debts along the way. I would like to thank the Colgate University Research Council for funding numerous related research trips as well as two courses in Nahuatl at the Yale Summer Language Institute. Recently, I received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society for my research into Nahuatl annals, and as I pursued that project, I gained new insights into this one; the welcome funds indirectly yielded a double harvest. Toward the end, the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, also helped defray some of the costs of this study.

It is perhaps my language teachers who have been most instrumental in making this work possible. Between them, Jonathan Amith (anthropologist), Michel Launey (linguist), and James Lockhart (historian) taught me what I needed to know to embark on a lifelong study of Nahuatl, passing on their penetrating insights into a fascinating language and putting me eternally in their debt. I have gradually realized that I also owe a great deal to the language teachers of my childhood and adolescence, in that they taught me young to open the linguistic channels of my mind. The most important were probably Jonathan Stapleton, who first inspired me to pursue the Romance languages with all my energy, and Dan Davidson and his staff at Bryn Mawr College, who stretched my abilities in new ways in their efforts to impart Russian to me.

I am profoundly grateful to the patient staffs of archives and libraries in three countriesthe Archivo General de Indias (AGI, Spain), the Archivo General de la Nacin (Mexico), the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), Emory Universitys Special Collections, the Huntington Museum and Library, the Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, the New York Public Library Rare Book Room, Princeton University Firestone Library, Yale University Library Manuscripts Division, and, finally, Colgate Universitys Special Collections. At these institutions, staff people who have gone above and beyond include Carl Peterson at Colgate, Barry Landua at the AMNH, and Jess Camargo, Teresa Jimnez, Estrella Sols, and Mara del Espritu Santo Navarro Snchez at the AGI. In 1998, when I first became fascinated by Malintzin, the staffs of the Museo de la Venta and the Hotel Cencali, both in Villahermosa, bore with me while I used them as a home base in my explorations of Tabasco.