The Avenue of the Dead at Teotihuacan, near Mexico City
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Posts tagged indigenous.
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Children of the Plumed Serpent closes July 1 - not much time left!
Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico | LACMA
Finger Ring Depicting Xipe Totec, 1000-1500, Mexico, Oaxaca, probably Mixtec, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Heye Foundations
WOMEN OF HISTORY | MALINALLI TENEPAL, DONA MARINA (1496 -1550) (Suyane Moreira)
La Malinche - meaning ‘captain’s woman’ - was lover, advisor, and translator to Hernán Cortés during his conquest of the Aztec Empire.
The woman who would become known as La Malinche was born Malinalli in the region between the Aztec Empire and the Maya states of the Yucatán Peninsula. When her mother remarried after her father’s death, Malinalli was sold to slave traders and taken south. There she learned the Mayan language and by the time Cortes arrived she spoke it fluently along with her own native Nahuatl.
She was in her late teens/early twenties when she was given - among a group of twenty slaves - to the Spanish by a defeated group of Mayans, and Cortés soon realised that her linguistic knowledge would be invaluable to him and she came to serve as a translator. Already having a Spanish priest who understood the Mayan dialects, Malinalli would translate the Nahuatl into Mayan and the priest would translate the Mayan into Spanish.
Along with the rest of the slaves, Malinalli was converted to Christianity and by all accounts accepted and preached it sincerely. As the conquest progressed she and Cortes became lovers and she learned to speak Spanish well enough that she could now translate everything herself.
She was held in high esteem by the Spanish and they spoke of her as being gracious and courageous, and her influence and closeness to Cortes was so complete that very few images from the Aztec codices show him without her at his side. At other times she is even shown alone, as though directing events as an independent authority.
Her legacy today is a mix of fact and legend, and she permeates historical, cultural, and social dimensions of Latin American cultures. Throughout the years has been seen in various ways: as the embodiment of treachery who betrayed her people, as the victim who did what she could to survive, as the saviour of her race for allowing translation as opposed to all out war, or simply as the symbolic mother of the Mexican people.
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Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of our racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X - © 1964 (via thenewneutral)
Que bonita es mi cultura…bueno la de mis antepasados
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Espectáculo callejero, Mexico City
