She did it for the love of Cortes who was her owner and her lover as well as the father of her son. The threat solidified her as a symbol of female sexuality that is at once disparaged and kept under control in the Mexican culture (Michan 2003: 34).
The dual aspect of La Malinche's legendary history shows that a woman's dependence on men for her importance and security leads to forced passivity, loss of identity, violation and abandonment. Despite the continuing scape-goating of what La Malinche stands for in the culture today, her press to develop herself and her independence, as well as her bridging function, has a still perceivable lineage, albeit in nascent form, in the individual Mexican psyche (Michan 2003: 34).
The story of Malinche and Cortes is a love story -- not a romantic story, which is important to understand when considering the presence of secrecy in their affair. They do not live happily ever after as romances almost always end; instead, Malinche is joined into a conscious union with a man who has essentially violated her -- not unlike a lot of the Mexican women at the time who were taken as mistresses by Spaniards except for the fact that she loved the man who violated her. She loved Cortes and stayed by his side and made him promise to stay with her in Mexico. He also cared for her, taking care of her son and making sure that he got an education as well as a position in government. He also made sure that Malinche had a husband when he went back to Spain (Singer & Kimbles 2004: 43). "The bright aspect of La Malinche's story can be recognized only if we realize that for betrayal to happen, there also has to be love" (2004: 43) -- an interesting statement to consider.
The story of La Malinche and Hernan Cortes is important in psychology because the two of the together represent the "erotic spirit," which Jung called "an archetype of the collective unconscious" (Coleman1994:...
Treatment of Women in Mexican Culture The choices for women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than the choices of men. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: The pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual - the virgin or the whore. Mexican culture is certainly not exempt from this
Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of America, edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla (Beacon Press, 1992). Broken Spears tells the Aztec peoples' account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Throughout history, the conquest has been told from the viewpoint of the conquistadors -- the Spanish victors. Broken Spears was the first book to tell the story of the conquest from the Aztecs' perspective. It was originally published in Spanish (in 1959),
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