La Malinche reimagined

La Malinche is having a moment. The 16th century Indigenous Nahua woman who acted as an interpreter for Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés – long reviled in Mexico as a traitor who hastened the fall of the Aztec Empire – has been reclaimed, by some, as a proto-feminist.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum launched a new initiative last year to reevaluate La Malinche’s legacy.

“We have a working group of anthropologists, historians and philosophers studying this very important, much-maligned figure, and it is very important to vindicate her,” Sheinbaum said.

Here in Albuquerque, La Malinche appears in two art shows that opened this month.

Delilah Montoya’s marvelous retrospective at the Albuquerque Museum, “Delilah Montoya: Activating Chicana Resistance,” includes a number of works that reference La Malinche, either directly or indirectly. As curator Josie Lopez writes in her exhibition catalog: “Montoya centers women who have been seen as monstrous, traitors, evil antagonists and the embodiment of the treacherous female,” with La Malinche at the top of the “malcriada” bad-girl list. While some Chicana poets, notably Carmen Tafolla, were already reclaiming La Malinche from a feminist perspective in the 1970s, Montoya’s 1993 photograph, “La Malinche” — the cover image of the Albuquerque Museum’s catalog — was one of the first such reclamations by a visual artist.

Just over a mile away, at Secret Gallery, 30 or so emerging artists, most of them Chicana, are rethinking La Malinche from their own perspectives. First-time curator Delisha Lopez (no relation to Josie) believes the reputation of La Malinche, whom she calls “one of the most influential Mexican women in history,” deserves defending. But hers is not a one-note show. The best thing about Lopez’s curation is she includes artists who take quite different perspectives on the enigmatic historical cypher, even one who portrays her as a modern-day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. “La Malinche” is gloriously polyvocal.

Secret Gallery’s title wall includes a black-and-white mural of La Malinche by Christin Apodaca, reminiscent of artist Chitra Ganesh’s comic book-style goddesses. Hung higher on the same wall is Marianna T. Olague’s tender, naturalistic oil painting of a mother (the artist’s sister) holding her infant daughter against her chest protectively. On the mother’s wrist is a tattoo of a luna moth, which often symbolizes “lunar” powers of intuition and adaptability — qualities the historical La Malinche seems to have had in spades.

Apodaca’s La Malinche is a mythic superhero, whereas Olague’s is an ordinary, real-life woman, contending with the burdens of motherhood. “Like La Malinche, I believe all mothers are survivors who must guard their children and themselves against patriarchy and the current state of the world,” Olague writes in the statement that’s included on her label.

Citlali Delgado’s “Metamorphosis” shows a line of five women, set against a hot pink background, marching leftward through time. The figures, both real and mythic, begin with La Malinche and Our Lady of Guadalupe and continue intergenerationally until we arrive at a young woman in contemporary clothes turning back to consider her ancestral past. We also see the rear foot of a sixth woman who has already marched into the future. Male hands jut into the frame, strangling the women, grabbing at their feet or otherwise attempting to hold them back. Delgado’s allegory of hard-won progress positions La Malinche as the proto-feminist “first cause,” the one who set it all in motion.

Huitzil Sol seems more skeptical, to put it mildly, about attempts to reframe La Malinche in purely positive terms. Her painting, “Military Recruitment,” portrays an anonymous Latina ICE agent, seated outdoors in front of the U.S.-Mexico border fence. In lieu of an artist statement, she quotes Malcolm X: “They will pay one of us, to kill one of us, just to say it was one of us.” By comparing La Malinche’s collaboration with the Spanish invaders to the choice by some Latina women to work for ICE, Sol recasts both as sub-oppressors, who, despite being born into a subaltern class themselves, become enforcers of an oppressive system.

But Sol’s ICE agent also wears a red bandana like those worn by Indigenous women revolutionaries throughout Mexican history, from the Yaqui soldiers of the Mexican Revolution to Zapatista leaders like Comandanta Ramona and Major Ana Maria. The painting is not a literal portrait but a symbolic representation of double consciousness and divided loyalties.

Most of us will never have to choose between becoming an ICE agent or a Zapatista fighter, but we all have different sides to ourselves. The side that wants to be successful and socially accepted may find itself at odds with the side that recognizes injustice and wants to speak out. Like the cartoon devil and angel that sit on the shoulders of Looney Tunes characters, our inner ICE agent and our inner Zapatista argue about whether to conform or rebel, to fly under the radar or to take a risk. The 20th century Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal called the fearful, conformist voice “the cop in the head.” A Jamaican friend once told me that theirs was a British colonial voice, a literal one, and it sounded like BBC narrator David Attenborough. Sol’s figure poses like the Mona Lisa, complete with crisscrossed hands — outwardly composed but inwardly conflicted. What is she thinking?

After spending time with Sol’s piece at the opening, I stepped into the courtyard and said to my friends, “Haven’t we all collaborated with Cortés, in a way?”

“Some more than others,” someone said, noting their own colonial heritage.

“Well, three of my ancestors came here on the Mayflower,” I said. “That’s worse, right?” Yes, we all agreed, my genealogy was the most problematic.

My “collaboration” comment wasn’t really about genealogy, though. I was thinking about the choices, big and small, that we make in our daily lives. I don’t always research every company whose products I buy to make sure they’re operating ethically and sustainably, and that they’re not using prison labor or destroying the rainforests. Sometimes I buy from companies I know are bad, simply because I don’t know the alternatives. Nobody’s perfect, but do we try to do better? Or do we use “nobody’s perfect” as an excuse to play dumb or pretend that our choices don’t matter?

The genealogy discussion relates to another theme in the show. La Malinche is sometimes called “la madre del mestizaje” — the mother of mixed-race peoples — since the son she had with Cortés was one of the first people with both Spanish and Indigenous heritage. Not all Mexican and Chicana/o people are direct descendants of La Malinche, but mythically she is often seen as their progenitor, like the biblical Eve.

“I am a descendant of both colonizers, my Spanish ancestors, and the people they colonized, my Native American ancestors,” Jocelyn Salaz writes in her statement. In her self-portrait, the artist points to plants along the Rio Grande that she actually harvests and processes to make natural dyes. She has also embroidered her painting with hand-dyed churro-yarn flowers. Salaz states that some of the earliest colonial-era depictions of La Malinche show her gesturing toward river plants, so her own art reflects the continuity and survival of Indigenous knowledge across time.

A famous mural by 20th century artist José Clemente Orozco, which he painted at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, explicitly imagines Cortés and La Malinche as the Mexican Adam and Eve, covering their nude bodies in shame. Orozco’s visual analogy suggests that these foundational figures were responsible for the fall of the Aztec Empire, just as Adam and Eve, in Catholic theology, were responsible for humanity’s fall from paradise. The Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz, in his influential 1950 essay, “The Sons of La Malinche,” said Orozco’s mural represented the impulse among 20th century Mexicans to “condemn our origins and deny our hybridism.”

Frank Zamora paints a version of Orozco’s image on the exterior of his cabinet sculpture, “Sueños, Enañosos” (“Deceptive, Dreams”), which he has designed as a contemporary, secular rendition of a traditional Latin American nicho, or wall shrine.

Delisha Lopez had originally intended “La Malinche” to highlight women and femme-identifying artists. But when the Colorado-based male artist Zamora showed up at the gallery with “Sueños, Enañosos,” she said it was too good not to include.

The three-panel interior of Zamora’s nicho makes visual references to colonial-era Nahuatl codices, Michelangelo’s “Pietà” and the Great Sphinx of Giza. The bewildering mashup of art historical references speaks to the way La Malinche’s legacy has been filtered through “misunderstanding, misinterpretation and misogyny,” as the artist writes in his statement.

Additionally, “La Malinche” presents philosophically and formally inventive works by Tera Muskrat, Alyssa Marie Metoyer and Beedallo — one of my favorite local artists. And while I don’t always advise reading text panels and artist statements at art shows — sometimes they can limit our interpretations — the ones in this show are great. If you take the time to go through and read each statement, you’ll see how so many of the artists re-create La Malinche in their own image, fusing her story with their own.

Secret Gallery is a scrappy, emerging art space, and the Albuquerque Museum is one of the most revered institutions in the state. But their current exhibitions dovetail perfectly with one another. That’s by sheer coincidence, I might add, since neither curator knew what the other was up to.

Delilah Montoya’s retrospective probably deserves its own review. It’s a great show and incredibly rich. But I wanted to at least acknowledge the shared themes and encourage readers to see both shows together — on the same day, if possible — as a sort of art show double feature.

As you view the art, you might ask yourself which version of La Malinche you identify with most, and why.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.