Fray Ángel María Garibay Kintana (18 June 1892 – 19 October 1967) was a Mexican

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

priest,

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, historian, and scholar of

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...

Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...

n 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 Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Codical Nahuatl (if it refers to the variants employed in the Mesoamerican Codices through the medium of Aztec Hieroglyphs) and Colonial Nahuatl (if written in Post-conquest documents in the Lat ...

, the ''

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...

'' of Postclassic central Mexico and the then-dominant

Aztec The Aztecs ( ) were a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico in the Post-Classic stage, post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different Indigenous peoples of Mexico, ethnic groups of central ...

empire. Alongside his former student

Miguel León-Portilla Miguel León-Portilla (22 February 1926 – 1 October 2019) was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was ...

, Garibay ranks as one of the pre-eminent Mexican authorities on the

Nahuatl language Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

and its literary heritage, and as one who has made a significant contribution towards the promotion and preservation of the

indigenous cultures There is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples, although in the 21st century the focus has been on self-identification, cultural difference from other groups in a state, a special relationship with their traditional territ ...

and

languages Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is ch ...

Mexico Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...

. Garibay and León-Portilla published texts and scholarly analysis for the study of classical Nahuatl literature, founded the journal '' 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 ( , ; fem. , literally 'mixed person') is a term primarily used to denote people of mixed Ethnic groups in Europe, European and Indigenous ancestry in the former Spanish Empire. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to ...

'' has been critically examined.Lee, Jongsoo. "Mestizaje and the creation of Mexican national literature: Ángel María Garibay Kintana's Nahuatl project." Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 6 (2014): 889-912.

Works

*1937. La poesía lírica azteca. Mexico City: Bajo el signo de ábside, 1937. *1940. Poesía indígena de la altiplanicie. Mexico City: UNAM. *1958. Veinte himnos sacros de los nahuas. Los recogió de los nativos Fr. Bernardino de Sahagun, franciscano, México, UNAM, Instituto de Historia: Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl. *1961. Llave del náhuatl: colección de trozos clásicos, con gramática y vocabulario, para utilidad de los principiantes. Editorial Porrúa. *1963. Panorama literario de los pueblos nahuas. No. 22. Editorial Porrúa. *1964. La literatura de los aztecas. México: J. Mortiz. *1965. Poesía náhuatl. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Historia, Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl. *1967. "Códice Carolino": manuscrito anónimo del siglo XVI en forma de adiciones a la primera edición del" Vocabulario de Molina." ''Estudios de cultura náhuatl'' 7 (1967): 88. *1987. Historia de la literatura nahuatl: Primera parte: Étapa autónoma: de c. 1430 a 1521; Segunda parte: El Trauma de la conquista: 1521-1750. Porrúa, 1987. *1993. Poesía náhuatl. 3 vols. Mexico City: UNAM. *1997. Panorama literario de los pueblos nahuas. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa.

References

*Torres, Víctor Manuel Hernández, "Ángel María Garibay Kintana: La vida sencilla" in ''Humanismo mexicano del siglo XX, vol. I'' Alberto Saladino García (ed.) Toluca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México 2004, 281–292.
online edition, Proyecto Ensayo Hispánico
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garibay K., Angel Maria Mexican Mesoamericanists Latin Americanists 20th-century Mexican historians Scholars of the Aztecs 1892 births 1967 deaths Mexican people of Basque descent Linguists from Mexico Linguists of Nahuatl Members of the Mexican Academy of Language People from Toluca 20th-century Mesoamericanists 20th-century Mexican translators People from the State of Mexico Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages Historians of Mexico Historians of Mesoamerica Writers from the State of Mexico National Prize for Arts and Sciences (Mexico)