Miguel León-Portilla


Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian.
He was one of the most reputable and commonly cited authorities on Aztec culture and literature in the pre-Columbian and colonial eras among Mexican academia. Many of his works have been translated to English and are widely read. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.

Early life and education

Born in Mexico City, Miguel León-Portilla had an interest in indigenous Mexico from an early age, fostered by his uncle Manuel Gamio, a distinguished archeologist. Gamio had a lasting influence on his life and career, initially taking him as a boy on trips to important archeological sites in Mexico and later as well. León-Portilla attended the Instituto de Ciencias in Guadalajara and then earned a B.A. and M.A. summa cum laude at the Jesuit Loyola University in Los Angeles. Returning to Mexico in 1952, he showed Gamio a play he had written on Quetzalcoatl, which resulted in Gamio introducing his nephew to Ángel Garibay K., whose publications in the 1930s and 1940s first brought Nahuatl literature to widespread public attention in Mexico. Needing to make a living, León-Portilla began attending law school and worked at a financial firm. At the same time he taught at Mexico City College, an English-language school in the Condesa neighborhood. Other instructors included important scholars of Mexican indigenous history and culture, :es:Wigberto Jiménez Moreno|Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, Fernando Horcasitas, and Eduardo Noguera. Gamio persuaded León-Portilla to drop his law studies and job in business to work at the Inter-American Indian Institute, a specialized organization of the Organization of American States, which Gamio directed. León-Portilla began graduate studies at the UNAM, completing his doctoral dissertation, La Filosofía Náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes, in 1956, which launched his scholarly career.

Career

His dissertation on Nahua philosophy was published in Mexico, and then translated to English as Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind and then many other languages. It was the first of his many works to be translated to English. His translations of Nahuatl and Spanish texts on the conquest of Mexico, first published in Mexico as Visión de los vencidos, translated to English as The Broken Spears, is the way many undergraduate students in the United States are introduced to accounts from indigenous participants and not Spanish conquistadors.
León-Portilla spearheaded a movement to understand and re-evaluate Nahuatl literature and religion, not only from the pre-Columbian era, but also that of the present day, especially since Nahuatl is still spoken by 1.5 million people. His works in English on literature included Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, and with Earl Shorris, In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present. He also compared the literature of the Nahuas with that of the Inca. Another area of research was on indigenous religion and spirituality, with works including Native Meso-American Spirituality, and South and Meso-American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation. He also published a work on the Maya, Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya.
León-Portilla was instrumental in bringing to light the works of Franciscan Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, a 16th-century primary source on the Aztec civilization, whose twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, often referred to as the Florentine Codex, are crucial for understanding Nahua religion, society, and culture, as well as for providing an account of the conquest of Mexico from the Mexica viewpoint. León-Portilla was the first to denote Sahagún as the "Father of Anthropology in the New World".
He contributed to the understanding of the development of the field of Mesoamerican history in Mexico. With Garibay, León-Portilla made contributions to the study of nineteenth-century Mesoamerican historian Manuel Orozco y Berra. León-Portilla also published two volumes on the work of Mesoamerican humanists, including his mentor Garibay.
In the field of colonial Nahuatl studies, particularly the New Philology, León-Portilla's work on a collection of late sixteenth-century wills in Nahuatl, The Testaments of Culhuacan, contributed to the understanding of local-level interactions within a Nahua town.
A subordinate but important interest of León-Portilla was the early history and ethnography of the Baja California Peninsula. He addressed this region in more than 30 books and articles, including a 1995 volume collecting several of his earlier publications.
Early in his academic career in 1969, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. That was the first of many academic awards and recognitions, including the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor, the highest award bestowed by the Mexican Senate. In 1970, he was elected to membership of Mexico's National College and, in 1995, to membership of the United States National Academy of Sciences. From 1987 to 1992, he served as his country's permanent delegate to UNESCO, during which time he successfully nominated five pre-Columbian sites in Mexico for inclusion on the World Heritage List.
On 12 December 2013, León-Portilla received the Living Legend Award from the U.S. Library of Congress. He was also a member of the Mexican Academy of Language and the Mexican Academy of History.

Personal life

León-Portilla married :es:Ascensión Hernández Triviño|Ascensión Hernández Triviño, a Spanish linguist and academic, in 1965. Their daughter, Marisa León-Portilla, is also a historian.
León-Portilla died in Mexico City on 1 October 2019 after having been hospitalized for much of the year.
The federal Secretariat of Culture announced that his body would lie in state on 3 October at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Notable Works

León-Portilla wrote more than a hundred and a half articles for several institutions, and more than forty books from which the following titles are among the most well-known:
Siete ensayos sobre cultura náhuatl