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201 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322849.c009 9 The Alva Ixtlilxochitl Brothers and the Nahua Intellectual Community Amber Brian It is consoling to think about the paths the fusion of the two cultures was taking. But it embitters that solace to see that tradition was not able to emerge from those early attempts and that its flight toward the heights of an authentically literary production was broken by a thousand circumstances.1 Ángel María Garibay K. Ángel María Garibay K. concludes the two-volume Historia de la literatura náhuatl (Garibay K. 1971 [1954]) with the suggestively titled chapter “Vuelo Roto,” in which he uses don Bartolomé de Alva (b. ca. 1597), the younger of the two Texcoca brothers this chapter addresses, to embody his concept of a “broken flight” in Nahuatl literature. For Garibay, Bartolomé de Alva’s translations into Nahuatl of three Spanish Golden Age dramas exemplify an emergent, though truncated , Nahuatl-language literary tradition.Volume 2 of Historia de la literatura náhuatl traces the historical circumstances and social institutions that supported the writings and activities of dozens of Nahuatl-speaking and Nahua-identified intellectuals from colonial New Spain by focusing on relationships between various Nahua intellectuals, particularly with regard to their involvement with the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlatelolco. He does, however, make mistaken assumptions about some of these connections. For instance,Garibay insists on erroneously referring to Bartolomé de Alva as the third child of don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ibid., 2: 308, 340), though it is now clear they were brothers. He also asserts quite confidently that Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. AMBER BRIAN 202 1578–1650) studied at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlatelolco along with don Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (ibid.: 228–29), though many scholars now dispute that claim.2 Even after acknowledging these discrepancies with current scholarship, it is important to note that Garibay’s study makes great strides in attempting to understand the nature and significance of the Nahua intellectual tradition in New Spain, and his discussion of the “broken flight” provides a useful starting place for analyzing the Ixtlilxochitl brothers. The way Garibay creates a pre-Colombian and colonial-era Nahuatl literary corpus emerges out of a mid-century, nationalist, humanist project. He established the foundations for studying Nahuatl texts as part of a specifically Mexican literature, a project carried on by his student and protégé, Miguel León-Portilla. 3 León-Portilla (1992: 167) outlines the biographical and intellectual formation of his teacher and mentor in “Ángel Ma. Garibay K. (1892– 1992), en el centenario de su nacimiento,” where he summarizes Garibay’s scholarship by commenting that “he was a genuine humanist who rediscovered , with a critical sensibility, the universal value and the great richness of the literary legacy of the Nahua community” [fue él un genuino humanista que redescubrió con sentido crítico el valor universal y la gran riqueza del legado literario de los pueblos nahuas]. A student of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, English, Nahuatl, and Otomí, Garibay sought to understand the literary production of many cultures; as León-Portilla points out, Garibay’s earliest study of Nahuatl letters, La poesía lírica azteca (Aztec Lyric Poetry), was published in 1937, the same year as his translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (ibid.: 171). Garibay’s Historia de la literatura náhuatl is a testament to his attempts to gain appreciation for Nahuatl texts within the framework of world literature, and he clearly saw in the figure of Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl a kindred spirit who could showcase the mixing of European and Nahua traditions. Though our approach to literature and the Nahuatl texts Garibay studied has changed in the past fifty years, his classic study still offers an important model of how to reconstruct the cultural significance of the many and diverse works produced in Nahuatl or by Nahua writers.More specific to the concerns of this chapter, Garibay remains one of the few scholars to have offered an extended study of Bartolomé de Alva and is one of the first and the few to have considered Nahuatl letters in a context of intellectual community. The Alva Ixtlilxochitl brothers’ works and lives were defined by a series of cultural and linguistic negotiations between the República de Indios and the República de Españoles...

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