A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

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to death for her disobedience and subsequent pregnancy, but she manages to escape and is received and protected by the elder Xmukane, the mother of Jun Junajpu. When Junajpu and Xb’alanke were born, they were harassed by their stepbrothers Jun B’atz’ and Jun Chowen, who made them submit to all kinds of abuse. As time passed the Twins grew up and took revenge on their older brothers. Using their wisdom, they tricked Jun B’atz’ and Jun Chowen and transformed them into monkeys, freeing themselves of their hostility. After this first deed, they descended to Xib’alb’a, to avenge the death of their parents. At the entrance to the Underworld, there were four different-colored rivers: blue, red, black, and yellow. They followed the black river, which led them to the House of Suffering, but thanks to the collaboration of the ants and the mosquitoes, they managed to overcome and destroy the Lords of Xib’alb’a. Their triumph ends in an apotheosis: one transforms into the sun and the other into the moon.

      During Lent in the year 1524, K’umarcaaj was conquered and destroyed, causing the downfall of one of the most powerful groups and sociopolitical organizations in Mescamerica, perhaps second only in importance to Tenochtitlán. With the destruction of this military and ceremonial center, a very rapid breakdown of the cultural and social fabric of the K’iche’ nation ensued. Its military and religious leaders were executed and the general populace was subjected to a regime of servitude or slavery, which together with forced migration, resettlement, and European diseases, left them with very few chances to organize a resistance. It was in this context that the tzij, rooted in the past “before the arrival of Christianity” (fo. 1r, lines 24-5), acquired a very important status: they formed the center of resistance for surviving invasion and destruction.

      Possibly around 1555, the friars charged with indoctrination of the Christian faith realized the importance of the “stories” from “pagan” antiquity. Presumably, young K’iche’ nobles recorded in their language, but using Latin characters, tzijs heard as children in their homes or ceremonial centers and recalled from memory, perhaps with the help of some sort of visual aids – wujs, ceramics, pictures, or stone inscriptions carved into stelae, murals, temples, and buildings, and in the notable case of a stone housed at the Chichichastenango Museum. Ruud van Akkeren emphasizes the oral nature of these tzijs and maintains that “the Popol Wuj seems an amalgamation of dance-dramas and oral history,” adding that “it only received its detailed, written form, as we know it today, when it was composed by a group of Maya scribes in the middle of the 1550s” (2000: 3). It is probable that this record was solicited by the indoctrinating friars, who in order to convert the indigenous people had closer contact with them than most colonizers. If indeed it occurred in this manner, the circumstances gave rise to one of the peculiarities of the Popol Wuj: with each recovery, it survived, but at the same time it suffered adulterations.

      Setting down the tzijs as a single piece during transcription into Western writing not only eliminated the dynamics and differences within the core of the corpus, but also determined and imposed the impossibility of its evolution. It became fixed as a document, which is to say a text that informs about the past but will not be able to change in accordance with new realities. It enters, literally, the shelves of the monastery, the administration, or overseas powers. Thus it is transformed into an informant, an object of scrutiny, a tool of power. This transmutation is of course much more complex, but we can say that the aforementioned impacts comprise the most important repercussions of the entry of the Maya-K’iche’ tzij into the “lettered city” of the Spanish colony and those which followed.

      The Evangelizing Period

      The friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) recorded, early on, the existence of tzijs referring to Xb’alanke, Jun B’atz’, and Jun Chowen. In his Apologética Historia Sumaria (1559) he claims to have had knowledge of the belief in these “gods” in the region of K’iche’ (chs. CXXIV, CCXXXV). The friars knew that many oral “stories” circulated about and also knew of the existence of “books” which the natives had hidden. They were also cognizant of the large number of rituals practiced by the K’iche’. However, neither in Las Casas nor in later chronicles that refer to the K’iche’ region can one find more information about these tzijs or kab’awils. It is puzzling that Las Casas, a Dominican friar and bishop of Chiapas in Mexico who assiduously kept abreast of the news from the recently invaded territories, did not have more precise information about the tzijs which we now know under the name Popol Wuj.

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