E-Mail For Lovers

I print it and read it again and again.  What a most literary message!  The suggestions for my thesis are good.  The only thing that irritates me is that he believes that we women are still oppressed, although he does have a point.  I thought about the three different names that were attributed to Malinche: she was Marina to Cortes, Malitzin to her parents, and your nation dubbed you Malinche.  I believed that she suffered way too much, most likely from her childhood through her youth and into her old age.  As a young girl, she was sold by her parents, and then she became the lover of the conqueror Cortes, who, in the end, passed her on to his best friend.  How horrible!  She was always treated as an object and even considered a traitor by our culture.  And we shouldn’t forget that she was an extremely intelligent woman who mastered three tongues.

Okay, she betrayed the Aztecs, and well did they deserve it.  At any rate, I sympathize with her.  Some of my friends consider me a “malinchista” because I married a foreigner and no longer live in my homeland.  But many of the social, political and literary events that occur there concern me and I try to stay as informed as possible whenever I go back to visit.

Marina.  Malitzin.  Malinche.  How strange names can be.  But what is really in a name?  Our heritage has saddled women with some of the most plaintive ones in the world.  My American friends have luminous, even uplifting names like “Amber” and “Crystal” and “Joy”.  True, some of ours are lyrically beautiful, as is my own: “Milagros.”  Did my mother truly consider me a miracle child?  Or did she secretly pray that I would perform one for her salvation? Or maybe my own?  And my mother “Socorro,” a cry for help that never seemed to come.  I consider some of the girls from my childhood and wonder if their parents ever thought about the meanings of the names they anointed them with, names like “Dolores,” “Martirio” and “Soledad,” echoes of pain, suffering and loneliness.