In the new struggle for power and economic control, indigenous peoples were evicted from the little land they had left and their almost slave-like manual labor was of great benefit to modernizing companies. The political plan of the elite was clearly Western and monocultural. In fact, this policy meant that the natives were not considered citizens of the new states, especially in economic matters (landownership and the cost of manual labor) and in language use. With modernity an accelerated process of “ladinization” began for the natives that further fractured what still remained of the pre-Columbian cultures.
These changes – external and internal – had repercussions that were linked with the manuscript and tzijs of the Popol ‘Wuj. In the new modern industrial states, religious epistemology was supplanted by science. This change meant that the cultures of the colonized territories lost interest in evangelization and the arena of taxonomical observation emerged to bring data to the idea of evolution, not just of natural species, but also of societies and history. Following Hegel’s premises for the explanation of universal world history, they tried to corroborate that Western Christian civilization was the most “evolved.”
In 1854 the Austrian traveler, explorer, and diplomat Karl Scherzer visited Guatemala as a member of a scientific committee. He had embarked on a global voyage in search of information and data that could be of interest to European scientists. It was a very similar journey to those undertaken years earlier (1799–1804) by Alexander von Humboldt. On this voyage Scherzer became aware of Father Ximénez’s manuscripts, archived at the library of the San Carlos University. They had been taken there from the convent of Santo Domingo in 1830 when General Morazán expropriated the holdings of the Catholic Church. Three years after his visit, Scherzer published Las Historias del origen de los indios de esta Provincia de Guatemala in Vienna; he included only Ximénez’s Castilian translation, not the K’iche’ text.
Shortly thereafter, in 1855, the French traveler and antiquarian Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg arrived in Guatemala. The abbé was scouring Central America in search of old documents he judged to be of interest to scientific circles in his country. In Guatemala he found the part of Ximénez’s manuscript containing the transcription and translation of the K’iche’ tzijs. Somehow he took possession of the document, and later published it in Paris in 1861 under the title Popol Vuh, Le Livre Sacré et les mythes de l’antiquité américaine. Thus it was the Frenchman who gave it the name we are familiar with and who traced in his title some of the new lines of interpretation which have been very important to this day.
With the expansionist thrust of the start of the nineteenth century and the repositioning of imperial powers it became necessary to take into account the disputing territories and of all they held: material and cultural assets. Cataloging them, classifying them, researching them – all were ways of taking possession. The knowledge belonged to the West, and the objects became peripheral, generally seen as distant and exotic. What caught the attention of the overseas territories undergoing reconquest were the past and the “antique” world. The realities of the indigenous communities where the tzijs of the Popol Wuj still thrived were ignored by Scherzer and Brasseur.
Brasseur introduced important changes in the manner of reading the K’iche’ text that contrast with the Spanish colonial approach. Starting with the title, he calls the Popol Wuj “Sacred Book.” Giving it a sacred nature implies two things. First, it indicates recognition of the validity of a religion outside of Christianity, which traditionally had been denied. This shows a secularization of the study of cultures and peoples, a fact that implies a fundamental change in scholarship. Second, bestowing a sacred classification tied to a concept of history suggests an immutable nature that belongs to an absolute past. In any case, in the abbé’s analysis the first idea predominates.
A second contribution is his translation of the K’iche’ words Popol Wuj as Livre national (national book) (viii). This interpretation places the Mayan texts within the “national” plan; that is, the agenda of the Creole and mixed-blood elite who had created the Central American republics in the European mold. Brasseur follows the model put forward, among others, by Ernest Renán in France, indicating the need to create a history that would justify the new political entity. Reaffirming the cultural centralism of the West, he thinks that the first written version of the “odd book” was the means that saved the text from complete destruction (viii). In other words, he only sees the aspect of its conservation through writing, but was not aware that the original tzijs, those produced from within the Maya culture, had been taken to the brink of extermination by European invasion and colonization.
Brasseur brought two more elements to his work. One was the assertion that the explanation of the origin of the American populations should be made in accordance with the data gathered by the new, “natural” disciplines, using empirical and factual evidence instead of biblical theological references. The resituation of the texts of the Popol Wuj within an ethnic and historic framework originating in migrations from Asia, as held by Alexander von Humboldt, eliminates many of the problems encountered by the exegetes of the colony in attempting to determine whether the natives were descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. The other significant element was that he put aside the linking of the tzijs of the Popol Wuj with those of the Bible. In any case, it is a big change from the interpretations made by Spanish missionaries. Furthermore, Brasseur uses comparative exegesis with other Mesoamerican texts. In this way, Brasseur was a pioneer in the discovery of the existence of a pan-Mesoamerican culture. This precolonial macro-culture had as its main characteristic a continuity of deep interconnections and mutual influences, despite variations observed in each region.
These observations do not imply a judgment of the personal attitudes of Scherzer or Brasseur, who undoubtedly admired and respected the indigenous text. They describe how biases in interpretation entered the picture in the nineteenth century and they help to see how many of these viewpoints and interpretations have at times been perpetuated with few variations. The preceding observations also show how the two voyagers of the nineteenth century were trapped in a situation analogous to that of Francisco Ximénez. On one hand they experienced a great seduction and admiration for the tzijs of the Popol Wuj, but on the other, as a part of the Western system of domination and of academia, they had to relegate them in relation to their European cultures. The difference between the voyagers of modernity and the doctrinal monk lies in that the latter proposed erasing those beliefs from the minds of the K’iche’, while Scherzer and Brasseur unburdened themselves of the problem, leaving the validity of the stories to antiquity. With this approach, for them the matter was settled.
Concurrent with these intellectual and political movements, within Guatemala a repositioning also occurred in the wake of the end of 300 years of Spanish colonization. When General Carrera created the Republic of Guatemala in 1847, Juan Gavarrete transcribed Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente y Chiapas y Guatemala, by Ximénez. Son of the wealthy notary Juan Francisco Gavarrete y Narváez, this Creole antiquarian and historian inserted himself into the political aims of modernity. Interested in recovering a past that would serve to justify the present new aim, Gavarrete dedicated himself to compiling unknown colonial texts. His main concern was to save them, then conserve them, and if possible distribute them. This was a fundamental part of the rewriting of the foundational discourse.
In 1872, in the “Foreword” for a general history to be edited under the auspices of the Economic Society of the Republic of Guatemala, Gavarrete makes an exposition about the necessity of writing the first history of the country, just as had been done by “civilized countries” and other republics that had become independent (l). The agenda of the new historical discourse should open with “recollections recorded by natives who learned to write after the conquest,” which is to say, the Popol Wuj (2). The precolonial past is mentioned as the Quiché Kingdom, which qualifies it as a nation. Its “myths and historical memories” are presented as the “NATIONAL BOOK, SACRED BOOK or COMMUNITY BOOK, meaning the POPOL-BUJ” (3). With this approach, the Mayan past receives important recognition, but at the same time it is lumped into the national
