Mestizaje and the Creation of Mexican National Literature: Ángel María Garibay Kintana's Nahuatl Project

Abstract

From the beginning of the twentieth century, numerous Mexican intellectuals attempted to construct a national identity through mestizaje, a mixture of indigenous and European races and cultures. In both historical research and artistic production, they focused on Prehispanic indigenous traditions as an essential part of Mexican national history. In this mestizo nationalism, however, Mexican intellectuals did not pay much attention to the original Prehispanic indigenous forms, and in many cases they recycled post-conquest indigenous traditions that had already been transformed. Thus, the indigenous traditions which appear in the discourses of mestizaje are reworked yet again by Westernized intellectuals in the name of Mexican nationalism. Ángel María Garibay's study of Nahuatl literature is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. This article examines how Garibay constructs a Prehispanic Nahuatl literary tradition based on the colonial chronicles of the sixteenth-century Catholic missionaries and informed by the European concept of literature.