Ángel María Garibay K.


Ángel María Garibay Kintana was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest, philologist, linguist, historian, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, specifically of the Nahua peoples of the central Mexican highlands. He is particularly noted for his studies and translations of conquest-era primary source documents written in Classical Nahuatl, the lingua franca of Postclassic central Mexico and the then-dominant Aztec empire. Alongside his former student Miguel León-Portilla, Garibay ranks as one of the pre-eminent Mexican authorities on the Nahuatl language and its literary heritage, and as one who has made a significant contribution towards the promotion and preservation of the indigenous cultures and languages of Mexico.
Garibay and León-Portilla published texts and scholarly analysis for the study of classical Nahuatl literature, founded the journal
:es:Estudios de cultura náhuatl|Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, and created the Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl. In the seminar, they taught fundamentals of literature and linguistics to Nahuas, who went on to create a modern Nahuatl literature. In recent years, the relationship between the development of Nahuatl literature as a field and the ideology of indigenismo and mestizaje has been critically examined.

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