A hundred years of Milpa Alta Nahuatl

Resumen

The community of Milpa Alta, located in the high country southeast of Xochimilco, is justly famous as the home of Doña Luz Jiménez, whose autobiography Lite and Death in Milpa Alta and collection of stories Los cuentos en náhuatl de doña Luz Jiménez are milestones of twentieth-century Nahuatl literature. In addition to her own literary achievement and a career as model and muse for a generation of Mexican artists, Doña Luz also assisted Benjamín Lee Whorf and Fernando Horcasitas in their Nahuatl research. The same fertile intelleetual soil that nurtured Doña Luz has given Nahuatl studies a distinguished colleetion of texts from individuals whose lives span an entire century. While the first of the Milpa Alta texts I will eonsider here were published in 1913, they were collected from contemporaries of the parents of Doña Luz. The most recent Milpa Alta texts were published hardly more than ayear ago. And so, as we approach the centennial of the birth of Doña Luz, we also celebrate a century of Nahuatl writing from Milpa Alta.