The "Memory of Men" and "Time Immemorial": Redefining Place in Sixteenth-Century Guatemala

In Guatemala today, the classic K’iche’ texts of the Popul Vuh, the Título de Totonicapán, and the Kaqchikel narrative, Annals of the Kaqchikels, have preserved powerful stories about the mytho-historical origins, migration, wars, and commerce of a glorious pre-conquest past while providing an account of struggles to adjust to Spanish colonial imperatives.  If the Tz’utujil produced a similar text - a memoria - that documented their history like those of the K'iche’ or Kaqchikel, its existence has remained undiscovered.  But that does not mean that the narrative did not exist.   Therefore to elicit their story of early colonial place-making, this paper draws on a boundary dispute between the Tz’utujil and their Kaqchikel neighbors over a harsh and mountainous piece of territory called Tzacb’al Q’aq. For nearly twenty years (1568-1587) the two groups contested the colonial placement of the boundary maker.  The subsequent court case reveals that, like the more famous texts, the Tz’utujils exhibited a similar narrative embedded within the individual testimonies.  Those accounts drew on the combination of lived experience captured in expressions of “the memory of men,” and a collective memory expressed in sentiments of “time immemorial,” to produce a cohesive and historically deep narrative that defended their presence in the region.  This case and other documents from the time period illustrate that, despite imperial attempts to redraw and reshape the physical and moral boundaries of Mesoamerican society, the concepts of  the “memory of men” and “time immemorial” helped to redefine a distinctly Tz’utujil sense of place.