Conquered Land: Delimiting Space in K'iche' Communities in Colonial Guatemala, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala circumscribed space in a variety of methods.  Noble lineages of the K’iche’ confederacy in the sixteenth century claimed territory and sacred spaces through titles, the end purpose of which to exact rights and privileges from the recognition of the king of Spain including the right to exploit the labor of their indigenous commoners.  At the local level space could also be defined through the creation of a document of sale written in the K’iche’ language that defined property ownership and delimited the land in question according to a border walk with the parties involved and the elite town council who acknowledged the border description.  This paper will examine how K’iche’ elites in Rab’inal, Xelaju and San Miguel Totonicapán defined the rights to repartition land as an act of conquest, which included the placing or seating of border markers and the defense of lands belonging to towns and their moieties.  With the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in the sixteenth century elites lost their positions as war captains as they were precluded from initiating armed struggles between differing ethnicities, city-states, and nations.  Warfare was a privilege that they could no longer initiate under Spanish colonial rule.  K’iche’ elite memory substituted the role of q’alel or war captain for alcalde and regidor, positions within the indigenous adaptation of the Spanish style town council.  The right to adjudicate land became a substitute for warfare and the responsibility of overseeing its repartition an act of conquest.  K’iche’ Maya conflated the ideas of the past onto the present because of their understanding of cyclical time which allowed them to symbolically reconstruct the past with the present in mind.