Miguel León-Portilla (ed.)

Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican historian and philologist, the leading scholar of Nahuatl thought, who argued that the Aztecs had a philosophy and spent seventy years translating its texts. The Broken Spears, published in 1959, gathers the accounts of the Spanish conquest written by the conquered in their own language in the decades after 1521, from the omens before Cortés to the fall of Tenochtitlan, and lets the vanquished tell the story Prescott had told from the other side. It has been translated into a dozen languages and is the way most readers first hear the Aztec voice.