Recasting La Malinche's Role as Symbolic Mother in Eugenio Aguirre's Isabel Moctezuma

Abstract

This essay seeks to situate Eugenio Aguirre's novel, Isabel Moctezuma, in the ongoing intertextual debate over the place of la Malinche in Mexican history and consciousness. As the title of the novel suggests, the protagonist is not Malinche, but rather another indigenous woman, the first-born daughter of the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma II. While Isabel is a lesser-known figure and little has been hypothesized about her in literary texts, the same cannot be said of her antithesis in the novel, Malinche, the indigenous adolescent who served as Cortes's interpreter and concubine during the Conquest of the Aztec Empire. In a broad range of literary works, Malinche has been cast as everything from traitor to victim to powerful mother-figure of mestizo Mexico. In his (in)famous mid-twentieth century essay, Octavio Paz declares her la Chingada, a willing (thus treasonous) victim who betrays her children, the Mexican people. While many writers have sought to vindicate Malinche from such accusations, I argue that Aguirre's novel marks a return to Paz's vision of Malinche by casting her as the monstrous double of the novel's protagonist and, in so doing, proposing the adoption of a new symbolic mother: Isabel Moctezuma.