Full Description
The collection of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles consists of rare highland Maya texts, which trace Kaqchikel Maya history from their legendary departure from Tollan/Tula through their migrations, wars, the Spanish invasion, and the first century of Spanish colonial rule. The texts represent a variety of genres, including formal narrative, continuous year-count annals, contribution records, genealogies, and land disputes.
While the Kaqchikel Chronicles have been known to scholars for many years, this volume is the first and only translation of the texts in their entirety. The book includes two collections of documents, one known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. The translation has been prepared by leading Mesoamericanists in collaboration with Kaqchikel-speaking linguistic scholars. It features interlinear glossing, which allows readers to follow the translators in the process of rendering colonial Kaqchikel into modern English. Extensive footnoting within the text restores the depth and texture of cultural context to the Chronicles. To put the translations in context, Judith Maxwell and Robert Hill have written a full scholarly introduction that provides the first modern linguistic discussion of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic structure of sixteenth-century Kaqchikel. The translators also tell a lively story of how these texts, which derive from pre-contact indigenous pictographic and cartographic histories, came to be converted into their present form.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Key to the Abbreviations of Grammatical Categories Used in the Interlinear Glosses
Part One. Introduction and Linguistic Commentary
Chapter 1. Background
The Kaqchikel and Mesoamerica
Composition of the Iximche' Polity
The Kaqchikel and Their Neighbors
Rulers
After the Invasion
Chapter 2. The Documents
The Indigenous Writing Tradition
The Annals of the Cakchiquels
The Xpantzay Cartulary
Chapter 3. Linguistic Commentary
The Writing System
Translation Format
Tropes of the Maya Literary Canon
Lexical Change
Colonial Kaqchikel Grammar
Nahuatl Influence
Conclusion
Chapter 4. The Translation Project and Politics
Limitations of Earlier Translations
Ideology of Translation
Mechanics of This Translation Project
Fruits of the Collaboration
Charts
1. Ajpo Xajil
2. Ajpo Sotz'il
3. Ajaw Xpantzay
4. Combined Rulers
5. Kaqchikel WinÄq
Bibliography
Part Two. The Chronicles
Spanish Map of Xpantzay Lands
The "Annals"
Xajil Chronicle
Pakal Documents
Q'ebut Genealogy
Q'eqak'Üch Genealogy
The Don Pedro ElÍas MartÍn Chronicle
Accounts of Disputes, 1580s-1591
Contribution Records
Marriages of Francisco DÍaz
The Xpantzay Cartulary
Lands and Boundaries of the Xpantzay
Origins and Lands of the Xpantzay
The Complaint
The Xpantzay Genealogy by Alonso PÉrez
The Xpantzay Genealogy by Felipe VÁsquez
Wars of the Sotz'il and the Tuquche'
