HEAVEN BORN MERIDA AND ITS DESTINY - Histomesoamericana

INTRODUCTION
clearly dates itself to 11 Ahau (1824-1848), and the Mani version of the
same text was copied by Juan Pío Pérez at Mani in 1837. The Chumayel
must therefore have been written between 1824 and 1837. The original
was in the hands of Audumaro Molina and then in those of the bishop of
Yucatan, Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona, by 1868. It was in Philadelphia in
1913, in Merida in 1916, in Boston in 1938, and in Durham, N.H., in
1945, was lost when Barrera wrote in 1948, and has only recently resurfaced
in the Princeton University Library (Edmonson 1970).
Unless otherwise noted, the documentation for the following assertions
is to be found in the present volume or in its predecessor, cited as the
Tizimin (Edmonson 1982). References to both works are cited by line or
note number, and both books are copiously indexed. On calendrical matters,
see also Edmonson 1976.
Language
The language of the Chumayel is Yucatecan Maya, which, as the early
Franciscans noted with great relief, was and is a widespread and homogeneous
tongue spoken in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana
Roo, and Chiapas, in the Guatemalan department of Peten, and in
Belize (formerly British Honduras). Even the most deviant dialects (the
Lacandon of Chiapas and the Mopan and Itza of Belize and Guatemala)
offer only minor obstacles to intelligibility. In the peninsula of Yucatan it
is possible to differentiate between an eastern and a western dialect, the
former being identifiable with the Itza of Chichen (as opposed to those of
Peten), the latter with the Toltec Xiu. Following the usage in the
Chumayel, I have used Itza throughout to mean the Itza of Chichen unless
otherwise specified. The Chichen Itza and the Toltec Xiu were the
two principal groups of elite lineages in post-Classic and colonial
Yucatan.
The town of Chumayel is close to the political and linguistic boundary
between the Itza and the Xiu, but its affiliations are clearly with the latter,
and it identifies the Xiu and their language simply as Maya 'people of
the cycle'. The Tizimin, which comes from Itza territory, uses the term
Itza 'water witches' in a similar fashion and refers tothe western Yucatecans
as Tutul Xiu (Náhuatl 'Toltec grasses').
To the south of the Chichen Itza were the provinces of Uaymil and
Chetumal. It is my guess that they and Belize constituted a dialect area
ancestral to Mopan, but the conquest decimated their population, and the
original inhabitants were swamped by immigrants from eastern and western
Yucatan.
To the southwest of Champoton, in the ancient provinces of Tixchel
and Acalan, lay the territory of the Chontal, but, while the ancestors of
both the Itza and the Xiu entered Yucatan from that direction, I find no
reason to believe that the Chontal had any particular cultural or linguistic
influence on either of them, Thompson (1970) notwithstanding. Still farther
to the west, in southern Veracruz, was Nahuat country, speaking the
southern dialect of Náhuatl, and there is clear evidence of Nahuat influ-