Pedagogical Juxtaposition and Productive Untranslatability: Teaching Versions of Malintzín in Early Latinx Studies and Beyond

This paper examines the appearance of Malintzín across various texts as an intersectional critical approach to teaching early Latinx studies. Malintzín is best known as the multilingual, enslaved Nahua woman who “assisted” the Spanish in conquering Mexico. In Hernán Cortés’s second letter and the 1826 Philadelphia-published novel Xicoténcal, she appears as an interlocuter who assists the Spanish. In Miguel León-Portilla’s influential The Broken Spears, she is named by the common Spanish-language and derogatory nickname “La Malinche.” Across these and other texts, the shifts in representations of Malintzín taught through juxtaposition offer what E. Mar García calls “productive untranslatability”—differences across context that, in their irreducibility, encourage reading characterization as contextual, showcase the multiplicity of Latinidad, and engage what Chela Sandoval calls “differential consciousness.”