Der Malinche-Komplex. Conquista, Genus, Genealogien

In the conquest of Mexico (1519-1521), La Malinche, a young indigenous woman, acquired prominence, indeed mythic stature as translator between natives and the Spanish conquistadors. Since the 19th century, she has been fashioned as traitress to the Mexican nation. In 1942, Rubén Salazar Mallén tagged a specific form of Mexican inferiority complex with her name, and in 1950 Octavio Paz, later Nobel prize laureate in literature, gave a definitive twist to her reputation as "Mexican Eve" by reconfiguring her as the deficient, victimized mother of the modern, hybrid, mestizo nation. This negative stereotyping has been seriously challenged by poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial perspectives upon her figure, coming up with questions regarding agency and cultural power for subjects marked both by coloniality and gender. In artistic practices as well as literary studies, heralded by Mexican and Chicana feminists and by scholars such as Tzvetan Todorov or Stephen Greenblatt, La Malinche has re-emerged as a plurilingual subject, agent of cultural translation and transvaluation. "Postmodern white" feminist Donna Haraway has even accommodated La Malinche for a cyborg imaginary, as a hybrid figure exemplifying subrepticious forms of access to the power to signify and of liminal transformation. The present study traces the historical evolution of these attributions, examining the way they relate with articulations of cultural belonging that emerge from early post-conquest writings as well as with manifestations in popular culture. There are Malinche figures in a great number of Mesoamerican traditional dances, and her name remains inscribed into landscape and nature. Thus the "Malinche complex" involves much more than just the historically specific expression of a particularly deficient undercurrent in Mexican national culture: subject to multiple transvaluations, La Malinche can be regarded as a stake in complex and contested discursive formations such as the old controversy about "the just causes for war against the Indians", as well as in the Querelle d`Amérique which reached its culmination in the 18th century; she is a driving, productive figure of colonial desire in the great connective narratives of Western sexuality and subject-constitution (Lawrence, Foucault), as well as in the highly criticized access of "white" feminism to women of color; and she is, still, a patron figure for autochthonous cultural power.