CATHARINA V. DE VALLE JO. Anacaona. La construcción de la cacica taína de Quisqueya. Quinientos años de ideologización. Santo Domingo: Colección del Banco Central de la República Dominicana, 2015. 300 pp.

The representation of Indigenous women in the Americas centered around the myth of Malinche, Doña Marina, for centuries, considered the betrayer of the Indigenous race and derogatorily called "La Chingada" [the one taken advantage of], as examined by many Mexican intellectuals including Octavio Paz.Similarly, to the north, it has been difficult to separate the legendary figure of Pocahontas from the stereotype of the servile Indigenous woman of traditional narratives.Catharina Vallejo, in Anacaona.La construcción del cacica taína de Quisqueya.Quinientos años de ideologización, tackles another one of the mythical Indigenous women, Anacaona (1474-1503), the earliest figure mentioned by the conquerors, and seeks to analyse her representation in the over half millennium that has passed since her hanging by the Spanish conquistadors.Vallejo brings together representations of Anacaona from the earliest chronicles of the Spanish conquistadors to modern plays, music and children's literature in French, English and Spanish.In the texts analysed, Anacaona is, turn by turn, an Indigenous woman, a cultural icon, a sexual/erotic object, an early feminist and a poet, among other descriptions, but she remains simultaneously and paradoxically, an intrepid leader and a defenseless victim.Vallejo divides her analysis in two segments.The first corpus, from Hispanic writers and thinkers who write in Spanish, deals chronologically with texts from the colonial period (chapter one), Romanticism (chapter two), and writing from the Twentieth Century to the present (chapters three and four).The second part includes texts in French produced in France, Haiti and Quebec (chapter five), texts in English by writers like Lord Tennyson (chapter six), and, in chapter seven, Vallejo describes children's literature, visual representations, musical and modern (re)interpretations of Anacaona, in all three languages.In order to contextualize the Indigenous woman's life, Vallejo returns to the period of first contact (1492) on the island baptised Hipaniola by the Spanish, probably divided at the time into a section known as Haytí and the other Quisqueya (specified in the monograph's title) and populated by various Indigenous groups, including the Taina and Caribe.As nothing remains of Anacaona's life and supposed poetry, Vallejo inevitably grounds her initial narrative in the descriptions made by Christian Spanish men, but is able to construct a semblance of the Indigenous woman's life while conscious of the ambiguities of doing so from her perspective and through the gendered lense.This foundational (and very limited) biography was,

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