Customer Reviews

The New World Of Martin Cortes

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I saw the paperback version of this book one day at my local bookstore and bought it sight-unseen right off the shelf. I was not disappointed as I read through it with great pleasure in just a couple of days.

Author Ann Lanyon (Malinche's Conquest) engages on her journey of discovery about the child known symbolically as the first mestizo, Martin Cortes, son of the conqueror Hernan Cortes and his translator/mistress known in different languages or incantations as Malinalli (given nahuatl name), Malintzin (nahuatl name in terms of honor), Marina (Spanish equivalent), Malinche (mixed language version). While there is not much written on the subject, we travel with her from Extremadura to Morelia to old church and state archives where she thumbs through Renaissance documents in search of any mention of him. To make matters more difficult, Cortes also named his son by his second wife: Martin Cortes, apparently he had George Forman complex. While the end result may be more travelogue than the kind of picture that was made available by Russell Shorto's "Island at the Center of the World", the great historical background and human story at the center of this drama more than make up for any shortcomings in this regard; it is still a story worthy of being heard even if few voices of the past are available to tell it to us. It also introduced me for the first time to the Mexico of the sons of the conquistadors, and the fate that befell them in the later decades of the 16th century after the conquest.

If I may add a slight criticism: some of the details provided could have been better proofed for accuracy. One little thing that caught my attention was her translation of "xochitepec" as place where flowers grow. Xochitl is indeed flower but tepec means hill. It's a trite observation but one that left me wondering about other details about which I knew less. Finally, she ends the book by meeting a direct descendent of our very Martin Cortes. But she gives almost no details. Maybe he was ugly or dirty and she was minding her manners to say nothing unkind. But she doesn't even tell us how she found him or checked his papers to see if he was authentic. It was a little anticlimactic. But those notes aside this is a great book for Mexico-lovers like myself or anyone interested in history and how things go on after the big events and characters of history go off into the sunset.