478 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Figure 13.1 “En las trincheras” [In
the Trenches], fresco by Diego Rivera
in the Ministerio de Educación Pública
in Mexico City. DACS 2015corpus of texts dating from the Colonial period. The most important work in this area
has concerned the vast corpus of Nahuatl (Aztec) language texts that were set down
in the Colonial period. Beginning in the early twentieth century with Fray Angel
Garibay and continuing in the present with the work of his student Miguel León-
Portilla and many others, there is now a continuing tradition of scholarship in both
classic and modern Nahuatl literature at major Mexican universities. Other major lin-
guistic groups whose colonial and modern languages and literatures are regularly
taught in Mexican universities are Mixtec and Zapotec (from the Valley of Oaxaca)
and Yucatec Maya.
Guatemala
To a certain extent, twentieth-century developments in the study and recording of
Guatemalan Indian literatures have until recently lagged behind those of Mexico, in
large part because the popular revolutionary setting that provided the impetus for
collection and scholarly creativity on these materials in Mexico developed later in
Guatemala and did not become institutionalized as part of the national agenda. A par-
tial revolutionary parallel in Guatemala occurred in 1944 and lasted only through©