In 1519 two empires collided in the Americas, and the pivot point was a teenage girl who had been traded away for a pile of food. Remembered as both the founding mother of a new nation and its ultimate traitor, her actual birth name is lost to history. This deep dive reconstructs the life of the Nahua woman known as La Malinche, whose linguistic skills bridged vastly different worlds.

We explore the theme of information as a means of survival, following an enslaved, displaced girl who became the indispensable translator of world history.

• A likely noble childhood, evidenced by her command of the elite lordly speech of Nahuatl
• Sold into slavery and forced to master Maya dialects, becoming trilingual to survive captivity
• The cumbersome translation chain from Spanish to Maya to Nahuatl during Cortes’s advance
• The disputed massacre at Cholula and questions about whether she was a convenient scapegoat
• Her legacy as traitor, founding mother, and pragmatic survivor projected across the centuries