When Spanish explorers happened upon the Americas, they brought Europeans into contact with native peoples who had inhabited the two continents for thousands of years. But these explorations and the conquests that followed did transform North and South America in dramatic ways. Martin Waldseemüller died in 1521 or 1522, so he was not able to incorporate into his maps the coastlines, waterways, and mountains reported by Magellan, Balboa, Cortés, Coronado, de Soto, Cartier, and other European adventurers. He would no doubt have been amazed to see the increasingly detailed maps that cartographers created of the elongated continent he first named America.
While mapmakers benefited from Europeans pushing deeper and deeper into the Americas, native residents were rarely asked if they wanted the plants, animals, goods, and germs offered by these invaders. Even Europeans seeking permanent settlements and peaceful trade relations with the Indians brought diseases that devastated local populations along with plants and animals that transformed their landscape, diet, and traditional ways of life.
Malintzin saw these changes firsthand. She watched as disease ravaged not only rural villages but even the capital city of Tenochtitlán. She encountered horses, pigs, attack dogs, and other European animals. She ate the foods and wore the clothes that her Spanish captors provided. Malintzin accompanied Cortés and his men as they conquered the Aztecs, and she watched as more Spaniards, including the first women, settled in New Spain. In 1522 she gave birth to Cortés’s son; two years later, she served as interpreter when he ventured north from Mexico City to conquer more territory. In 1526 or 1527, however, she married a Spanish soldier, Juan Jaramillo, and settled in Mexico City. She soon had a daughter, Maria, and in 1528 Jaramillo and “his wife, doña Marina” were granted lands for an orchard and a farm. We do not know how long Malintzin lived or what she thought of her life as the wife of a Spanish gentleman. But her children would grow up in a world that was very different from the one in which their mother was raised. In the century to come, the contacts and conflicts between native peoples and Europeans escalated, especially in North America. So, too, did conflicts among European nations seeking to gain control of North American lands.