[2] Cortés chose her as a consort, and she later gave birth to their first son, Martín – one of the first Mestizos (people of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry) in New Spain.

[3] La Malinche's reputation has shifted over the centuries, as various peoples evaluate her role against their own societies' changing social and political perspectives.

[4] In Mexico today, La Malinche remains a powerful icon – understood in various and often conflicting aspects as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or the symbolic mother of the new Mexican people.

[13] According to historian Camilla Townsend, the vocative suffix -e is sometimes added at the end of the name, giving the form Malintzine, which would be shortened to Malintze, and heard by the Spaniards as Malinche.

In the annotation made by Nahua historian Chimalpahin on his copy of Gómara's biography of Cortés, Malintzin Tenepal is used repeatedly about Malinche.

[27][28][c] She was born in an altepetl that was either a part of or a tributary of a Mesoamerican state whose center was located on the bank of the Coatzacoalcos River to the east of the Aztec Empire.

[45][46] Scholars, historians, and literary critics alike have cast doubt upon Díaz's account of her origin, in large part due to his strong emphasis on Catholicism throughout his narration of the events.

[22][45][47] In particular, historian Sonia Rose de Fuggle analyzes Díaz's over-reliance on polysyndeton (which mimics the sentence structure of many Biblical stories) as well as his overarching portrayal of Malinche as an ideal Christian woman.

[51][e] Her acquisition of the language later enabled her to communicate with Jerónimo de Aguilar, another interpreter for Cortes who also spoke Yucatec Maya, as well as his native Spanish.

[62][64] Historian Gómara wrote that, when Cortés realized that Malinche could talk with the emissaries, he promised her "more than liberty" if she would help him find and communicate with Moctezuma.

The emissaries also brought artists to make paintings of Malinche, Cortés, and the rest of the group, as well as their ships and weapons, to be sent as records for Moctezuma.

[73] The translation chain grew even longer when, after the emissaries left, the Spaniards met the Totonac,[74] whose language was not understood by either Malinche or Aguilar.

[75][76] Karttunen remarks that "it is a wonder any communication was accomplished at all", for Cortés' Spanish words had to be translated into Maya, Nahuatl, and Totonac before reaching the locals, whose answers went back through the same chain.

[76][74] After founding the town of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz to be freed from the legal restriction of what was supposed to be an exploratory mission,[77] the Spaniards stayed for two months in a nearby Totonac settlement.

The explorers claimed that the Cholulans stopped giving them food, dug secret pits, built a barricade around the city, and hid a large Aztec army in the outskirts to prepare for an attack against the Spaniards.

[15] But modern historians such as Hassig and Townsend[89][90] have suggested that Malinche's "heroic" discovery of the purported plot was likely already a fabricated story intended to provide Cortés with political justification for his actions, to distant Spanish authorities.

[89] In particular, Hassig suggests that Cortés, seeking stronger native alliances leading to the invasion of Tenochtitlan, worked with the Tlaxcalans to coordinate the massacre.

Cholula had supported Tlaxcala before joining the Aztec Empire one or two years prior, and losing them as an ally had been a severe blow to the Tlaxcalans.

[54][96] Moctezuma's flowery speech, delivered through Malinche at the meeting, has been claimed by the Spaniards to represent a submission, but this interpretation is not followed by modern historians.

[42][95] The deferential nature of the speech can be explained by Moctezuma's usage of tecpillahtolli, a Nahuatl register known for its indirection and complex set of reverential affixes.

[101] Although Martín was Cortés's first-born son and eventual heir, his relation to Marina was poorly documented by prominent Spanish historians such as Francisco López de Gómara.

But many scholars and historians have marked her multiracial child with Cortés as the symbolic beginning of the large mestizo population that developed in Mesoamerica.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier who, as an old man, produced the most comprehensive of the eye-witness accounts, the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España ("True Story of the Conquest of New Spain"), speaks repeatedly and reverentially of the "great lady" Doña Marina (always using the honorific title Doña).

If she had been trained for court life, as in Díaz's account, her relationship with Cortés may have followed the familiar pattern of marriage among native elite classes.

In contrast to earlier parts of Díaz del Castillo's account, after Marina began assisting Cortés, the Spanish were forced into combat on one more occasion.

The work of Rosario Castellanos was particularly significant; Chicanas began to refer to her as a "mother" as they adopted her as symbolism for duality and complex identity.

[113] Mexican feminists defended Malinche as a woman caught between cultures, forced to make complex decisions, who ultimately served as a mother of a new race.

[115] Some historians believe that La Malinche saved her people from the Aztecs, who held a hegemony throughout the territory and demanded tribute from its inhabitants.