Questão 14 -

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, a avaliação de Cordelia Candelaria sobre a atuação de La Malinche leva a relativizar a acusação de traição porque a pesquisadora considera que