Concesiones Malinchistas: Teresa de la Parra’s Identification with Doña Marina

Abstract

In the first of a series of three lectures delivered in 1930 in Bogota, Colombia, on the roles women played in the history of Latin America, Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra (Ana Teresa Parra Sanojo) set out to revise Dona Marina’s role in Cortes’s Conquest of Mexico. By deflating the epic elements of the official historiography, Parra downplays Cortes’s heroic exploits to re-present Dona Marina as an exemplary female historical figure. While rectifying Dona Marina's story in the historical accounts, Parra commits a glaring omission. She glosses over the Cholula episode which has tarnished Dona Marina’s participation in the Conquest with the stigma of betrayal in the eyes of postcolonial nationalists. In this essay, I argue that this omission is particularly revealing about Parra’s life and writing. Haunted by a sense of national disaffection, Parra uses her “revised” portrait of Dona Marina to rehabilitate her own image as a Venezuelan writer vis-a-vis a nation that she had “betrayed” and a Latin American public that she had abandoned when she left Venezuela for France in 1923.