Mary Magdalene, La Malinche, and the Ethics of Interpretation

By comparing the intersecting histories of interpretation of Mary Magdalene, a first-century disciple of Jesus, and La Malinche, a sixteenth-century Mesoamerican woman enslaved by the Spanish conquistadores, Jennifer Vija Pietz critically evaluates the use of past lives to address contemporaneous concerns. She demonstrates how the earliest sources portray each woman as an agent in the foundation of a new community: Magdalene’s proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection helped form the first Christian community, while La Malinche’s role as interpreter between Spanish and native people during the Conquest helped establish modern Mexico. Pietz then argues that over time, various interpreters turn these real women into malleable icons that they use to negotiate changing conceptions of communal identity and norms. Strikingly, popular portraits develop of both women as archetypal whores who represent transgression—portraits that some women have experienced as harmful. Although other interpreters present contrary portraits of Magdalene and La Malinche as admirable emblems of female empowerment, Pietz argues that the tendency to turn real people into icons risks producing stereotypes that can obscure past lives and negatively affect people in the present. In response, she posits strategies for developing historically plausible and ethically responsible interpretations of people of the past.