In March 1519, after losing a battle to the Spanish, the lords of Potonchan handed Hernan Cortes twenty women as a gift. One of them spoke two languages. Within two years she was the most important person in the conquest of Mexico, and she still belonged to whoever had been handed her last.

You're her. A lord's daughter from the Gulf coast, given away as a child, sold to the Maya, handed to the Spaniards, passed from one captain to the next, and made the voice that brought down an empire. This is your life from the day you're born to the day the records go quiet.

Told in second person and based on the sources. Her sale as a girl, the twenty women, Portocarrero, the interpreting at Cholula and in front of Moctezuma, her son with Cortes, the wedding to Juan Jaramillo on the Honduras march and her early death are all in the record. Where the sources disagree (her birth year, how she was sold, the wedding, how she died) we say so.

SOURCES

- Camilla Townsend, Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006)

- Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain

- Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico

- Francisco Lopez de Gomara, History of the Conquest of Mexico

- Bernardino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex, Book 12

- Lienzo de Tlaxcala

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