Anna Lanyon

Australian author Anna Lanyon looks behind the legend of Marina/Malinali/La Malinche, the young Indian woman who served as a translator for Cortés and who eventually bore him a son. Unlike Pocahontas, who inspired a Disney film, and Sacagawea, whose image is engraved on a dollar coin, Marina is remembered as a traitor rather than a heroine of legend.

I wondered how Lanyon could find enough material about Marina to fill a book. I discovered that the book is as much travelogue as history. Lanyon follows Marina's trail through the southern part of Mexico. She visits places where Marina lived or traveled according to history or legend. Although few physical traces remain from that era, her presence left its mark in the cultural memory.

Lanyon ends where I would have started – in archival repositories. I'm more interested in the historical person than the legend. More than once Lanyon mentions that she didn't begin her archival research until her trip was winding down, and she ran out of time before she had exhausted every potential resource. Who knows how much more she might have learned if she had started with the archives?… (more)