Malintzin (FCbk12fir)
This iconographic example, featuring a black and white sketch of doña Marina, a name that was Nahuatlized as Malintzin by Nahuas and Malinche by Spaniards, is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. There is no gloss, per se, and no reference to her in the text that is closest to this sketch. This example shows Malintzin standing between a group of Spaniards and a Nahua man wearing a cloak (so probably a lord). She is gesturing with her left hand. She wears a long handmade blouse (huipilli) that has a reinforcing rectangle at the base of the V-neck. She also has a long skirt or culottes (naguas in Spanish). Her feet are bare. Her hair is twisted up into the axtlacuilli hairstyle of adult Nahua women, with two points above her forehead.
Stephanie Wood
alintzin is shown here doing the work of interpretation. At the time of the landing of the Spanish invasionary party at Veracruz, Malintzin would actually still have been co-translating with a shipwreck survivor, Gerónimo de Aguilar, a Spanish Franciscan friar, that the invaders picked up in the Yucatan. Seemingly, by the second half of the sixteenth century, the memory of his participation in early interpretation had faded.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
interpretación, interpretar, traducir, nahuatlato
Marina, Nahua interpreter to Cortés, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/Marina
La Malinche
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 12: Conquest of Mexico", fol. ir, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/ir/images/0 Accessed 7 February 2026.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
