The arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexican territory was no chance matter. Previous Spanish explorations along the Gulf and Caribbean coasts had generated rumours of fabulous civilizations and whetted the Spanish appetite for conquest. Cortés himself was an educated man from a comfortable background who had attended the University of Salamanca, though he abandoned his studies at the age of nineteen in order to seek a fortune in the New World. He began his colonial life as a settler in La Española (Hispaniola) and while there ingratiated himself with the future governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez. Once in Cuba, the two men together planned the expedition to Mexico until Velázquez grew uneasy about Cortés’ ambitions, and ordered him not to set sail; but Cortés defiantly set out in 1519, with 800 men and 16 horses. In Yucatán, Cortés joined company with one Jerónimo de Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked there during a previous Spanish expedition and had learned to speak Mayan. Following the meeting between Cortés and Aguilar a local chieftain gave Cortés twenty slaves, among them a princess who spoke Maya and Nahuatl. She and Aguilar were to serve as the interpreters through whom Cortés communicated with the indigenous peoples, but Malintzín, the Indian woman, was to become by far the more significant of the two in the Mexican psyche, for she also became Cortés’ mistress and bore him a son who came to symbolize the start of a new ‘Mexican’ mestizo race. She was Malintzín to the Indians, Doña Marina to the Spaniards, or Malinche, the popular name by which she is now generally known. In one of his Cartas de relación, the letters he sent back to Carlos V, Cortés said that after God, Spain owed the conquest to Malinche. However, from the point of view of many of the Indians, she was a traitor, and their demise was attributable in part to her collusion with the invaders. These negative associations are the ones that have lasted in the Mexican mind: nowadays the term ‘malinchismo’ has come to refer to betrayal in general, and particularly to the betrayal of one's culture, such as can be seen in the behaviour of those who admire all that is foreign, and especially those who ‘sell out’ to the United States.