Alfredo Ramos Martínez, La Malinche, 1940

Marcela Guerrero: We’re seeing here a portrait of La Malinche. La Malinche was an Aztec woman who was the interpreter to Hernán Cortés, the colonizer who conquered Mexico. 

Narrator: Assistant Curator Marcela Guerrero is one of the organizers of this exhibition. 

Marcela Guerrero: Because of her ability to translate Náhuatl and other languages to Spanish, people see her as a traitor. I find this view unfair. She was a woman who was obviously in an unequal relationship of power to Hernán Cortés and she was just using what she could to survive.

Narrator: In the years that followed the revolution, many Mexican artists celebrated the fact that the nation was made up of many cultures, both European and Indigenous. In this context, some people—like Alfredo Ramos Martínez, the artist behind this painting—began to celebrate La Malinche. And more broadly, artists began picturing the nation’s Indigenous roots, foregrounding the visual traditions of the Aztecs, Maya, Zapotecs, and others. Today, we might question the way some of these artists focused primarily on the clothing and customs of these cultures. For Guerrero, Ramos Martínez was different.

Marcela Guerrero: In a way, this painting gives a more nuanced understanding of who a real person was who then became a mythical idea of what a Mexican woman is. It’s stripped down to the bare essentials of her face, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Very frontal, facing the viewer, confronting the viewer, and in a way, with the simplicity, she’s asking people, “You have to see me as a real person.”