Chichicastenango

Sometime around 1701 to 1703, the Dominican friar Francisco Ximenez, then serving as parish priest in Chichicastenango, gained access to a Kiche-language document held within the community and made a copy, transcribing the Kiche text in one column and adding his own Spanish translation alongside it. That document, since lost in its original form, was the Popol Vuh, the Kiche Maya account of creation, the hero twins and the founding of the Kiche lineages, and Ximenez's copy is the only version of the complete text known to survive from before the modern era. Without a parish priest positioned inside a highland Kiche community, fluent enough in the language to attempt a serious translation and inclined to preserve rather than destroy an indigenous religious text, this specific transmission chain would very plausibly not exist at all.

Ximenez's manuscript eventually left Guatemala and made its way, after passing through multiple hands, to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it remains today, catalogued as Ayer MS 1515. Modern English translations by scholars including Dennis Tedlock and Allen Christenson, both produced with extensive consultation of contemporary Kiche cultural and linguistic knowledge, have shaped how the text is read and taught worldwide, treating it as a living reference point for Kiche identity rather than as a closed historical artifact. Chichicastenango's role in that chain is a matter of settled documentary record, however open other questions about the town's religious life remain.

Before Chichicastenango existed as a Spanish colonial parish town, the dominant power in the region was Q'umarkaj, called Utatlan by the Spanish, the fortified capital of the Kiche Maya kingdom, a short distance from where Chichicastenango stands today. Pedro de Alvarado's forces captured and destroyed Q'umarkaj in 1524, burning the Kiche king Tecun Uman's capital and effectively ending Kiche political independence, and the Dominican order subsequently gathered surviving Kiche communities from the surrounding highlands into new, more easily governed and evangelized settlements, of which Chichicastenango was one. The town's own name is not Kiche at all but Nahuatl, chichic and tenanco, meaning roughly place of the nettles, imposed by the Tlaxcalan soldiers who fought alongside the Spanish and whose language became, for a period, the practical lingua franca of conquest-era record keeping across much of Mesoamerica.

That layered history, a Kiche capital destroyed nearby, a town built to reorganize its scattered survivors, and a name that is neither Spanish nor Kiche but borrowed from a third, allied indigenous language, is well documented in scholarship on the Kiche highland kingdom and its colonial aftermath. Anthropologists who have subsequently studied the highland Kiche region have documented, as a matter of published scholarship, that Catholic and Maya religious practice visibly coexist in the town today; this atlas records that scholarly finding as a fact about the town's significance without describing the specifics of either tradition's living observance.