Mexico reimagines Malinche’s place in history

[Malinche, from A1]

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A MAN ascends the stairs beneath Jose Clemente Orozco's mural ", Cortes y la Malinche in Mexico City.

(Photographs by FÉLIX MÁRQUEZ For The Times)

saga of a young woman who used her wits to prosper in a patriarchal society of swashbuckling and ruthless Spanish conquerors.

“I think it’s fair to say that she is the most important woman in Mexican history,” said Ursula Camba Ludlow, a Mexican historian who wrote a Malinche biography. “Her decisions helped to shape the very face of Mexico.”

Today, Malinche is lauded by Mexican intellectuals and lawmakers, and her image once again graces a public space in Mexico City.

Just this month, the government installed a bronze of Malinche and five other Indigenous women along the elegant Paseo dela Reforma. It marked the culmination of a rebranding campaign spearheaded by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

“Why place her figure here after years during which we were taught that she was a symbol of treason?” Sheinbaum asked during a dedication ceremony. “In reality, her life reflects the condition of an Indigenous woman immersed in a world of violence — of invasion and dispossession — that forced her to use her words and her knowledge of languages to survive.”

This time, there were no protests, no one declaring that malinchismo — behavior mirroring that of Malinche — signified a peculiar iteration of Mexican self-hatred.

Further evidence of a paradigm shift: Enthusiastic theatergoers thronging to “Malinche the Musical,” the brainchild of Nacho Cano, a Spanish rock star turned impresario.

“Mexico has two mothers: the Virgin of Guadalupe and Malinche,” Cano told a Mexican interviewer last year, after his spectacle moved from Madrid to Mexico City. “But we have hidden and judged La Malinche without listening to her.”