I would call the book Malintzin’s Choices a biographical historical account. Throughout the book it explains her life as well as her children and grandchildren’s lives but to a lesser extent. The book not only discusses the Spanish conquest of Latin America but also the impact that the cultural diffusion of those events on Spain. The Spanish had long been battling the Moors (Muslims) in the Iberian Peninsula and even well into the 16th century. One of the things I found most interesting about the acceptance of the mestizo society by the Spaniards. Racial differences were not a cause of dissonance among the Spanish but instead class differences and so-called enemies of the Spanish Empire like Jews and Muslims. “This was good enough, it turned out, at least for a mother. Impure blood, at this point, did not connote the blood of darker people but, rather, the blood of declared enemies and of commoners”. (Townsend 196). The mestizo society of the Spanish colonies was in stark contrast to the later English colonies in the Americas where intermarriage with indigenous peoples was not only discouraged but outlawed. It could be argued that this is a book about women because of how the Spaniards had to intermarry with native women. Many of the colonizing Spanish men wanted to marry an Aztec noblewoman in hope of gaining her wealth and establishing their own encomiendas. Malintzin was an exception to most other indigenous women however. “Malintzin was not the usual blushing bride, and certainly not what most men had in mind when they imagined marrying a captive Indian maiden. Instead, she was an independent entity, fully an adult, and one who had a very public role. She held her own everyday in the conquistadors’ world.” (Townsend 169). This book, I would say, is more about the meshing of the Spanish culture and the indigenous culture and how they both managed to keep certain aspects of both in the mestizo society. Cultural diffusion is an essential theme to Malintzin’s Choices.
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