Past and Present in Victor Hugo Rascon Banda's La Malinche and Marisol Martin del Campo's Amor y conquista

Abstract

Mexican writers have repeatedly used the life of La Malinche as a vehicle for their reflections on the question of Mexican national identity. This has resulted in a tradition of ahistorical and unduly theological readings of Mexican history which presents La Malinche either as traitor to or symbolical mother of a nation that did not in fact come into being until several centuries after his death. With the help of Michael André Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson's work on closed and open narratives, this article reads two recent works on La Malinche, in order to determine to what extent they reiterate traditional views of La Malinche's role in Mexican history. V'ctor Hugo Rascón Banda's play La Malinche deploys postmodernist techniques of anachronism and pastiche, but nevertheless reinserts La Malinche into the standard master narrative of the Mexican nation. Marisol Martín del Campo's novel Amor y conquista mixes painstaking historical reconstruction with the overt fictionalizing of the past, and succeeds in capturing a sense of uncertainty and openness of the story of La Malinche's life.