La Malinche

Malintzin was born into a Nahua noble family on Mexico's Gulf coast, but after her father died her mother reportedly gave her away, and she was sold into slavery among the Maya of Tabasco, where she learned the Yucatec Mayan language on top of her native Nahuatl. In 1519 the Tabascan Maya, defeated in battle by Hernan Cortes's small Spanish expedition, handed over twenty enslaved women as part of a peace settlement. Malintzin was among them.

Her value became obvious almost immediately. A Spaniard travelling with Cortes already spoke Mayan, so Malintzin could translate from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, into Mayan, and he could render it into Spanish. Within months she had learned Spanish directly and became Cortes's sole interpreter and closest advisor, present at nearly every negotiation, alliance and confrontation of the conquest, including the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1521. She also bore Cortes a son, one of the first recorded mixed-heritage children of the encounter.

Her position was never one of free choice; she had been enslaved twice before the Spanish arrived and had little say in what followed. Yet in later Mexican culture her name became shorthand for betrayal, a burden placed on a woman who had no realistic path to refuse the role history handed her. More recent scholarship has pushed back against that verdict, reading her instead as a survivor who used the only leverage available to her.