Mariajosé Rodríguez-Pliego will give a talk called, "The Many Forms of Malintzin: Remembering the Colonial-era Interpreter Through Indigenous and Latinx Storytelling," on Wednesday, February 15th at 10 am.
Reception to follow.
This talk studies contemporary recuperations of Malintzin, an Olulteca interpreter who worked alongside Hernán Cortés during his military campaigns throughout 16th-century Mesoamerica. It makes the case that a multilingual approach to Malintzin’s story, who herself lived in between five languages, can reveal her figure as a juncture where multiple forms of narrating the Americas, or Abiayala, can coexist. It begins by analyzing the work of Mixe linguist Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, whose essays draw attention to the memory of Malintzin as a respected figure kept alive for centuries in Indigenous dances. It then moves on to a short story by Nahua author Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez, who gathers oral narratives about Malintzin as a protector of forests. Lastly, it traces a parallel search for alternative Malintzins within Chicanx feminist writing in the United States, explaining that while the interpreter was cast as an icon of Chicanx identity in the 1970s and 80s, contemporary poets have begun to reassess the racial and symbolical weight ascribed to her figure. Each of the essay’s three sections takes up a literary form—the essay, the short story, and the poem—in order to ask how this ubiquitous figure is cast according to the possibilities that each form affords.
Bio: Mariajosé is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her dissertation "Foundational Futures: Nation, Migration and Environment in the Literatures of Abiayala," studies the idea of the nation through the vantage point of Latinx and Indigenous narratives. It brings together a multilingual corpus of stories in Spanish, Nahuatl and English to trace connections between storytelling traditions that teach us alternative forms of land ownership and belonging. Her work has been awarded the 2021-2022 Presidential Master's Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and is forthcoming in the journal Comparative Literature.