From Volume 35: A poem by Yulia Issa

Yulia Issa


La Malinche


Without the help of La Malinche we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico.

—Bernal Díaz del Castillo

Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España

On Higuera Street my house stands unmarked,

Stark steps of passersby are hastened

With fear locking their spine, with hatred,

While I stand Janus-like between two worlds.

You wrote me in the history a traitor

Chingada, lover of the foreign men,

Weeping Llorona, Spanish toy,

A ploy of treacherous ambition my survival.

After all,

When an empire falls
Somebody is to blame.

So you conveniently forgot

That to the Spanish men I was a Doña,
My country-men regarded me as one

With Cortés, the conquistador. Our son

Was a mestizo, just like you.

Forgot that for a single jade

My mother sold my body and blue blood—

Unwanted heir—to be a Nahua slave,

Disposed of to the Spanish traders.

With prickly pear pecks on my fingertips

Still, cocoa dust under my nails,

I then got used to smell of salt on Spanish ships,

Sharp smell of white and bearded gods

Who shrank away from water with cat-like manliness.

Forgot that all the emperor—a tyrant—

Did to protect his Aztec colossus from raid

Was order to dye bodies of the slaves

The brightest shade of blue and carve

Them empty chested, blood sucked out,

(For the megalith corn-man in the sky

Sitting sate and benevolent),

Tumble them down the temple steps.

When silenced fathers of the sacrificed

Stood up to form—yes, you forgot—

Alliances instead of shedding blood

By my trilingual words inspired,

Somebody was to blame for the fall of the empire

As you look back,

Who better than a woman, slave, and dead?

*This poem won the Worcester County Poetry Association College Poetry Contest 2014 Manuscript Prize