Abstract
In the first of a series of three lectures delivered in 1930 in Bogota, Colombia, on the roles women played in the history of Latin America, Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra (Ana Teresa Parra Sanojo) set out to revise Doña Marina’s role in Cortés’s Conquest of Mexico. By deflating the epic elements of the official historiography, Parra downplays Cortés’s heroic exploits to re-present Doña Marina as an exemplary female historical figure. While rectifying Doña Marina's story in the historical accounts, Parra commits a glaring omission. She glosses over the Cholula episode which has tarnished Doña Marina’s participation in the Conquest with the stigma of betrayal in the eyes of postcolonial nationalists. In this essay, I argue that this omission is particularly revealing about Parra’s life and writing. Haunted by a sense of national disaffection, Parra uses her “revised” portrait of Doña Marina to rehabilitate her own image as a Venezuelan writer vis-à-vis a nation that she had “betrayed” and a Latin American public that she had abandoned when she left Venezuela for France in 1923.
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Reis, L.C. Concesiones Malinchistas: Teresa de la Parra’s Identification with Doña Marina. Neophilologus 95, 579–591 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-010-9220-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-010-9220-6