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Historical person
La Malinche, also known as Malintzin or Doña Marina, was a Nahua woman who became an interpreter, adviser and intermediary for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Born around the beginning of the sixteenth century, she was displaced from her original community and enslaved before being given with other women to the Spaniards in 1519. Because she spoke Nahuatl and a Maya language, she initially interpreted through the Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar and soon learned Spanish herself.
Malintzin’s linguistic skill made her central to negotiations with Indigenous rulers, allies and enemies as Cortés advanced toward Tenochtitlan. She was not simply a translator: contemporary accounts show her conveying political messages and operating within dangerous diplomatic encounters. She bore Cortés a son, Martín, and later married the Spanish officer Juan Jaramillo. Her post-conquest reputation has been fiercely contested, ranging from accusations of betrayal to recognition of the coercion she endured and the indispensable intermediary role she occupied between radically unequal worlds.
Gary Jennings’ Aztec brings La Malinche into the fall of Tenochtitlan as interpreter and intermediary beside Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies. Aztec Revenge looks back on her legacy through Martín Cortés, her son with Cortés, whose mixed ancestry carries political meaning in colonial New Spain. Colin Falconer’s Feathered Serpent makes Malinali’s languages and political judgement indispensable to Spanish negotiations and alliance-building. Manolo Palomares’ Hernán Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico likewise presents Doña Marina as interpreter, negotiator and cultural intermediary during the march on Tenochtitlan. Palomares’ Mestizo shifts attention to Martín Cortés Malintzín, using the claimed memoir of La Malinche’s son to explore the divided inheritance created by conquest.
Series
The Aztec sequence follows Indigenous and mixed-ancestry protagonists through five centuries of Mexican history, from the height of Tenochtitlan to the wars that ended Spanish rule. The first novel gives Mixtli’s account of the empire under Ahuitzotl and Moctezuma II and carries his life into the conquest. Later…
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Epic Historical Adventure is Colin Falconer's publisher-defined collection of stand-alone historical thrillers rather than a continuous narrative sequence. The novels range from Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and the Mongol Empire to the Ottoman court, the conquest of Mexico, colonial India, shipwreck and twentieth-century Palestine. Most volumes can be…
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Standalone books
