Storytelling, Living Memory, and cultura @ MSI en Nuevayol

Storytelling plays an important role in the communication and stewardship of cultural memory and in the making of collective stances. This is one reason why I was happy and deeply honored when the Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY recognized and supported my project on Malinalli Tenepal and her story across cultures, languages, and time.

With MSI, my research joins a larger communal story.

One situated within but also extending beyond Chicana, Latina, Latin American, and decolonial feminist academic group conversations about Malinalli, a historical actor in sixteenth-century Mexico. An enslaved Nahua woman considered the first “interpreter of the Americas,” her story has been (re)interpreted and remixed across centuries and political communities.

As ofrenda her story continues to offer intellects like the towering Gloria Anzaldúa or OG Octavio Paz ways to understand and make sense of social and literary history, practical pasts, and community psychology.

“¡Malinchista! Gloria Anzaldúa, La Prieta, and Feminist Indigeneity in the Americas” examines one important moment in this ongoing history remixing her story. I explore how Chicana and queer writer Gloria Anzaldúa brings together the figures of La Prieta and Malinalli Tenepal, the so-called “Malinche,” to challenge patriarchal and colonial narratives that previously cast Indigenous and mestiza women as traitors, betrayers, or figures of blame within Mexican, Chicana, and Latina cultures.

Cultural memory does not live only in archives, museums, or academic texts. It is carried through families, languages, art, stories, food, music, the new media, and our communities. It is continually interpreted, contested, transformed, and passed on. Anzaldúa’s autohistoria-teoría writing and storytelling practice is all about how cultural memory can feed cross-cultural coalition using empathy to drive sense of community and social empowerment and impact learning and personal growth.

My project, therefore, is not simply about telling another story of Malinalli Tenepal. It is about participating in the larger collective work of asking how stories become cultural memory, who has the authority to tell them, and how we might reclaim, reinterpret, and meaningfully carry those stories forward in highly contested cultural moments like our own.

As both a research and community center, the Institute creates a space where the complex cultural inheritances of Mexican American and Latina/o/x New Yorkers, students and their families, scholars, artists, educators, and cultural workers across titles, can be studied, shared, and carried forward to support equitable access to education, art, and human connection in the age of AI.

In the essay I talk about how Anzaldúa creates another way of thinking about identity, memory, pride, and belonging rooted in coalition-building, resistance, and a feminist conception of indigeneity. Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui counsciousness and imperative promotes wellbeing and healing through Chicana art and feminist theory. In communities impacted by colonialism -- classism, xenophobia, racism, or misogyny as machismo -- our collective and individual stories can be racist and sexist, too.

With MSI, my project becomes one small part of that larger stewardship of Mexican American and Latina/o/x cultural memory as we on go, curando heridas in Nueva York.