Land, Politics, and Memory in Five Nijai’ib’ K’iche’ Títulos: “The Title and Proof of Our Ancestors”

Abstract

Mallory E. Matsumoto’s Land, Politics, and Memory in Five Nijai’ib’ K’iche’ Títulos: “The Title and Proof of Our Ancestors” provides facsimiles, transliterations, transcriptions, and translations from K’iche’ into English, and in one title from K’iche’-influenced Spanish into English, of the foundational documents of one of the most important lineages of the K’iche’ people, the Nijai’ib.’ It also includes historical, linguistic, and orthographic analyses of the five titles produced for the Nijai’ib’ great house. Many of its members resided in Quetzaltenango and Momostenango in the sixteenth century and paid to have this document created and copied in the K’iche’ language. In the early seventeenth century, some members of the Nijai’ib’ lineage also had the title translated from K’iche’ to an ungrammatical Spanish that betrays the translating scribe as ethnically K’iche.’ They had the title drawn up and the copies made for the purpose of possible future legal conflict that might arise to contest the privileges that the documents might have protected. Matsumoto’s book provides not only a valuable resource for scholars of indigenous languages and sixteenth-century indigenous peoples but also an excellent example of linguistic scholarship that rivals what Dennis Tedlock did for the Popol Vuh, Robert M. Carmack and James L. Mondloch did for El Título de Totonicapán, and what Judith M. Maxwell and Robert M. Hill II did for the Kaqchikel Chronicles.Matsumoto’s book is broken up into two parts. Part 1 consists of four chapters that examine the historical background of the Nijai’ib’ titles and an explanation of the linguistic and the philological methodologies Matsumoto utilizes to examine the use of language in these documents. It also contains four appendices with tables of orthography that allow Matsumoto to identify at least three different scribal hands in the manuscripts’ productions. She defines what an indigenous title consists of and contrasts it with the purposes and uses of Spanish titles. Her study carefully examines K’iche’ language scribal practice, especially in their treatment of copying, translation, and transcription. In this part, Matsumoto defines the methodologies that she uses in her own transcriptions and translations. Part 2 is divided into sections that correspond to the five documents, one of which, Titulo Iskin rech Quetzaltenango, Momostenango, Matsumoto has discovered and identified as a separate and fifth title to the four already recognized titles for the Nijai’ib’ great house. Each of the five has a section that contains a facsimile of the original manuscript, Matsumoto’s transcription of the text, and her translation into English.Matsumoto explains well the historical contextualization of the titles and their uses in the sixteenth century. Matsumoto does not consider the use of these particular titles from the Nijai’ib’ in historical studies of the Spanish “conquest” or invasion and of the indigenous history of Guatemala in the sixteenth century. In her historical background, she relies heavily on Oakah Jones’s 1994 Guatemala in the Spanish Colonial Period, a study that focuses on Spanish accounts and does not consider Antonio Gallo Armosino’s 2001 work, Los Mayas del siglo XVI, Ruud van Akkeren’s 2007 La conquista indígena de Guatemala, or the more recent Carlos Fredy Ochoa García’s 2016 Buenabaj: El relato de los títulos Nijaib,’ which include the Nijai’ib’ documents in their historical analyses. Guatemalan and European scholars working in Guatemala, such as Armosino, Ochoa García, and Van Akkeren, have been much more savvy in constructing a history of the sixteenth century that includes native peoples and their accounts in comparison with studies from most US historians that rely on Spanish sources alone. This minor criticism should not negate the significant contribution that Matsumoto’s linguistic study of the Nijai’ib’ titles makes to the fields of linguistic anthropology, ethnohistory, as well as Mesoamerican, K’iche’an, and indigenous studies. Students and scholars alike will find her methodologies and approach as well as her transcriptions and translations useful.