Miguel León-Portilla

Miguel León-Portilla (1926–2019) was a Mexican anthropologist and historian renowned as a leading authority on Aztec (Nahua) history, literature, and philosophy. Born in Mexico City on 22 February 1926, he earned degrees from Loyola University in Los Angeles and completed his Ph.D. at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), where he later served as a long-time professor and researcher in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and at the Institute of Historical Research. He also held roles such as director of the Inter-American Indigenist Institute, director of UNAM’s Institute of Historical Research, and delegate of Mexico to UNESCO.

León-Portilla’s most widely known work is The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, originally published in Spanish in 1959 as Visión de los vencidos, which compiles and interprets Nahuatl-language accounts of the Spanish conquest. Over his career he published more than forty books on pre-Columbian and colonial-era Nahua thought and literature, including titles such as Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, The Aztec Image of Self and Society, and, with Earl Shorris, In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature—Pre-Columbian to the Present. He died in Mexico City on 1 October 2019.[