La Malinche - References in Modern Culture

References in Modern Culture

Malinalli is the main character in a 2011 historical novel by Helen Heightsman Gordon, "Malinalli of the Fifth Sun: The Slave Girl Who Changed the Fate of Mexico and Spain." This thoroughly researched novel reveals the cultures of Aztec and Maya peoples realistically and sympathetically. The historical characters of Cortes and Marina-Malinalli are fully developed with human faults and virtues. They interact with believable fictional characters typical of their cultures as speakers of Nahuatl, Mayan, and Spanish.

La Malinche is the main protagonist in such works as the novel Feathered Serpent: A Novel of the Mexican Conquest by Colin Falconer, and The Golden Princess by Alexander Baron. In stark contrast, she is portrayed as a scheming, duplicitous traitor in Gary Jennings' novel Aztec. More recently she has been the focus in Malinche's Conquest by Ana Lanyon, a non-fiction account of the author's research into the historical and mythic woman who was La Malinche. A novel published in 2006 by Laura Esquivel casts the Nahua, Malinalli, as one of history's pawns who becomes Malinche (the novel's title) a woman "trapped between the Mexican civilization and the invading Spaniards, and unveils a literary view of the legendary love affair". She appears as a true Christian and protector of her fellow native Mexicans in the novel Tlaloc weeps for Mexico by László Passuth.

La Malinche, in the name Marina ("for her Indian name is too long to be written"), also appears in the adventure novel Montezuma's Daughter (1893), by H. Rider Haggard. First appearing in Chapter XIII, she saves the protagonist from torture and sacrifice.

Her story is told in Cortez and Marina (1963), by Edison Marshall.

She is a key character in the opera La conquista (2005) by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero.

A fictional journal written by La Malinche and discovered in an archeological dig is a central element in a 2008 adventure novel The Treasure of La Malinche by Jeffry S. Hepple.

Of additional interest is the novel Death of the Fifth Sun by the late Robert Somerlott. Malinche is the narrator of the novel which was published in 1987 by Viking Press. Robert Somerlott was a longtime resident of San Miguel de Allende where he was the Director of PEN International for many years. He did extensive research into the life of Malinche and the daily life of the people of the central valley of Mexico. The book is a classic historical novel of the conquest of Mexico.

In the fictional Star Trek universe, a starship, the USS Malinche was named for La Malinche. This was done by Hans Beimler, a native of Mexico City, who together with friend Robert Hewitt Wolfe later wrote a screenplay based on La Malinche called The Serpent and the Eagle. The screenplay was optioned by Ron Howard and Imagine Films and is currently under development at Paramount Pictures.

Octavio Paz addresses the issue of La Malinche's role as the mother of Mexican culture in The Labyrinth of Solitude. He uses her relation to Cortés symbolically to represent Mexican culture as originating from rape and violation. He uses the analogy that she essentially helped Cortés take over and destroy the Aztec state by submitting herself to him. His claim summarizes a major theme in the book, claiming that Mexican culture is a labyrinth.

In the animated television series The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which chronicles the adventures of a Spanish boy and his companions traveling throughout South America in 1532 to seek the lost city of El Dorado, a woman called "Marinche" becomes a dangerous adversary. The series was originally produced in Japan, and when translated into English, the name the Japanese had rendered as "Ma-ri-n-chi-e" was transliterated into "Marinche."

She was also referred to in the song "Cortez the Killer" by Neil Young.

She is a vampiric Prince in Mexico according to setting information given for the popular role-playing game Vampire:the Requiem, as well as having an entire bloodline of vampires named after her and supposedly descended from her.

A reference to La Malinche as "Marina" is made in the early 19th century Polish novel "The Manuscript Found at Saragossa," in which she is cursed for yielding her "heart and her country to the hateful Cortez, chief of the sea-brigands." The reference appears in a story related on the forty-fourth day, in which the effects of the curse fall on the person of an apparently fictional descendant of Montezuma named Tlascala.