From a Guatemalan Parish to a Chicago Reading Room

The manuscript's journey to Chicago began with Francisco Ximenez, a Dominican friar serving in the Kiche town of Chichicastenango in Guatemala in the early eighteenth century, who transcribed the Kiche text in parallel columns alongside his own Spanish translation, almost certainly working from an earlier written or oral Kiche source that has not itself survived. His manuscript remained in Dominican and then Guatemalan academic custody for over a century, eventually held by the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City, before the French traveller and cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg acquired it in the 1850s and took it to Europe, removing the manuscript from Guatemala in circumstances the country had no practical means to prevent at the time.

From Europe the manuscript passed through private collectors before Edward E. Ayer purchased it and, with his wider collection, gave it to the Newberry in 1911, where it has remained since as a heavily used research resource for Maya studies rather than a public display piece. Guatemala has no active legal claim to the manuscript, but some cultural heritage advocates in the country have pointed to its nineteenth century departure as part of a broader pattern worth revisiting, alongside other Mesoamerican manuscripts and objects that left Central America for European and American collections during the same colonial and early national period.