Decolonisation and Depatriarchal Narratives: Violence, Power and Language in Contemporary Chicana and Mexicana Writing on La Malinche

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In September 2021, Amnesty International refocused public attention towards the 'epidemic of disappearances and femicides in Mexico', testifying that throughout 2020 ten women were murdered per day (Amnesty International 2021). This project contends that the country's colonial history and patriarchal power structures are key to understanding the roots of this systematic violence. My study is the first to analyse Mexico's gendered colonial history and the situation of contemporary Mexican women through the figure of La Malinche, the Indigenous noblewoman who, upon the Conquistadores' arrival in Potonchán in 1519, became Hernan Cortés's translator and is now considered a national traitor (Trexler 1995). My study evaluates how contemporary Mexicana and Chicana (Mexican American) literature about La Malinche enables us to interpret this wave of gender-based violence. The primary texts for my study are Carmen Tafolla's poem 'La Malinche' (1978), Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Sandra Cisneros's short story 'Never Marry a Mexican' (1991), Pat Mora's poetry collection Agua Santa/Holy Water (1995) and Laura Esquivel's novel Malinche (2006).Through a workshop with a Mexican feminist collective engaged in the 'depatriarchalisation' of Mexican society, Las Constituyentes Feministas, mine will be the first interdisciplinary, bilingual, cross-border analysis of La Malinche. A central aim of this collaboration is to establish the power of La Malinche as metaphor in Mexican feminist activism. Firstly, I will conduct several interviews to establish to what extent La Malinche's presence is felt within the collective, discussing whether the members trace social/physical violence against Mexican women back to the country's colonial history. Secondly, I will organise a reading group concerning my project's primary Chicana/Mexicana texts. I will gather data on the activists' views on La Malinche as cultural/literary metaphor, addressing issues that the collective engages in, as the role of language in the propagation of ideas and violence. With the overlap of La Malinche scholarship (Gaspar de Alba 2014) and the long-lasting concern of gender-based violence in Mexico, my project will extend the former beyond academia.