She's been branded a traitor. A new exhibition says Mexican icon Malinche was anything but
DENVER — Though he may be renowned for lobbing vulgar insults, the barb that Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva directed at Supervisor Hilda Solis in July 2020 left even longtime observers stunned. Solís had made comments critical of systemic racism by police toward people of color. "Are you trying," Villanueva said in a Facebook post addressing Solis in one of his regular online broadcasts, "to earn the title of a La Malinche?"
The comment left many people — including me — ice cold, since to deploy Malinche's name as an insult is to parrot a gross misogynist trope.
Malinche, the Indigenous girl who served as interpreter to Hernán Cortés in the early days of the Spanish invasion of Mexico — and who was, for all intents and purposes, enslaved by him — has long been deployed as a symbol of betrayal in Mexico. Indeed, she's been cited as the figure on whom responsibility for the fall of the Aztec empire is often heaped. Never mind that colonization occurred as part of a confluence of factors that included conflict between warring city-states and the unchecked spread of European diseases. Centuries out, Malinche carries the blame.
After Villanueva's tirade, Solis, the only Latina member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, described the sheriff's statements as "inappropriate, racist and sexist." Villanueva never apologized for the remarks.
This grotesque incident appears in an exhibition catalog for a show at the Denver Art
