ABSTRACT
Pocahontas has been called the mother of a nation, seen in some romanticized accounts as the counterpart of George Washington. Like La Malinche, Pocahontas has been the useful site for colonizing narratives, but has not left her own record. As Cypess suggests, she is a palimpsest upon whose body a series of narratives have been written, both by the Aztec chroniclers and the conquistadores, but not, significantly, by La Malinche herself, whose linguistic abilities placed her at the crossroads of history, but whose voice is absent from these records. Reading the narrative about La Malinche that emerges in the space created between these accounts, scholars propose that she was named Malintzin, born in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the eldest daughter of a privileged family. Sacajawea, too, inhabits this liminal, miscegenated, maternal space in the contemporary and later accounts of her place in the narrative of colonialist domination and manifest destiny.
