• HOMAGE After his passing on Tuesday, Mexicans kept paying homage to Miguel León Portilla, who at age 93 was the world’s foremost authority on Náhuatl philology and philosophy, with some people asking the local Mexico City Government for a street to be named after him.
• LEGACY “He got rid of the term ‘The Discovery of America’ which was a very Eurocentric concept: ‘We discovered’America’ as if it had no millennia of history behind. Miguel proposed the term of ‘Encounter of Two Worlds’ “, said Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, a prominent archeologist.
• BOOK Drawing from original indigenous voices and texts, León Portilla published the Spanish version of a book that would arguable become a keystone of a new way to look at Mexico’s history: “The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico”.
• US/MX Back in 2013, the US Library of Congress presented León-Portilla with its Living Legend Award which honored a selected number of artists, film makers, entertainers, scholars and others like musician Johnny Cash, activist Gloria Steinem and publisher Katharine Graham.
