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? ( )

http://moloch981.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/le-parole-di-malinche/ ( )

Interesting both for the story of this woman and the legends that have been built around her but also to read about the historical research process by a Latrobe academic. ( )

A good read about a misunderstood woman. It chronicles the author's journey of trying to find the story of Malinche as well as telling the story of Malinche as its pieced together. A unique read and I recommend it for any history buff, especially those focused on the great explorers and the ancient empires of Mexico and points further south. ( )