K’iche’ Litigation and the Effectiveness of Law and Justice in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Highland Guatemala

K’iche’ justices of highland Guatemala adjudicated and litigated on behalf of their communities, often acting as intermediaries between their people and the colonial Spanish legal system.  Indigenous justices initiated criminal legal proceedings through investigatory inquiry known as informaciones because they often arrived upon a scene first.  They took preliminary testimony and acted as a court of first instance.  The records of their proceedings most often took the form of official petitions written in a K’iche’ized Spanish depending upon the linguistic abilities of the municipal council scribe who was out of necessity bilingual.  The Spanish petition was a synthesis of the oral testimony taken from a court of first instance.  On occasion, a K’iche’ scribe kept the official record of court of first instance proceedings in K’iche’.  This paper will examine the ways in which indigenous K’iche’ justices were co-opted into the Spanish legal system working with Spaniards and how indigenous communities combined collective interests sometimes through inter-ethnic alliances to seek justice against regional abuses from Spanish officials.  Part of the methodology deconstructs the K’iche’ized Spanish of legal petitions allowing us to consider the manner in which bilingual intermediaries, usually the scribe of the municipal council, confronted the demands of Spanish legalism. This presentation will also consider the use of K’iche’ language documents and it will answer the questions of why and in which instances did K’iche’ peoples use their own language in documents submitted to Spanish courts from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth centuries.  This study pays particular attention to the ways in which “the archive” is constructed in San Miguel Totonicapán and Xelaju and the methods and processes of the indigenous notaries responsible for interceding in written Spanish petitions on behalf of the justices of K’iche’ municipalities or for indigenous individuals.