The Annals of the Cakchiquels, a Kaqchikel-language history kept by the Xahila family of Guatemala (printed Philadelphia 1885)
A history of the Kaqchikel nation written in Kaqchikel, in the Latin alphabet the missions taught, by a member of its ruling family who was already an adult when the Spaniards arrived in 1524, and continued by his kin. It records the epidemic that killed its author's grandfather and father before any Spaniard reached them, the levies of five hundred men and five hundred women for the gold washings, and the royal official whose arrival stopped the burnings.
Why this wins its question: The Kaqchikel annals are usually met in English as a line in a survey - an indigenous chronicle of the conquest of Guatemala, also called the Memorial de Solola - or through modern scholarly editions that are not open. This object quotes the annals themselves on three things that are rarely put together: the epidemic that killed the writer's grandfather and father before a Spaniard had reached them, the levies of five hundred men and five hundred women for Alvarado's gold washings with the writer's insistence that he witnessed it, and the arrival of a royal official after which the burnings, the hangings and the imposts stopped - followed two paragraphs later by Alvarado hanging the king. It also carries the edition's own admission that from page 188 the Kaqchikel text is omitted, so a reader knows exactly which quotations have an original behind them and which do not.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The manuscript is a folio of forty-eight leaves, closely written on both sides in a very clear and regular hand with indigo ink, incomplete, the last page closing in the middle of a sentence. It is written entirely in Cakchiquel except for a few marginal glosses in Spanish, in a later hand and in ordinary ink. It came to light in 1844, when Don Juan Gavarrete was commissioned by Archbishop Francisco Garcia Pelaez to arrange the archives of the Convent of San Francisco of Guatemala and found the sheets among the manuscripts there.
The document is made up of the depositions and statements of several members of the Xahila family, and the part printed in the 1885 edition was written by one of them who had already reached adult years at the first arrival of the Spaniards in 1524. He names himself only once, in the year 1582, as "me, Francisco Ernantez Arana" - the editor notes that Cakchiquel has neither the Spanish h nor the letter d, so that the baptismal name Hernandez takes the form Ernantez. He states that his grandfather, the king Hun Yg, and his father, Balam, both died in 1521, and that his own marriage took place in 1522; the dating of the several hands is the editor's inference from entries such as one under 1560 that mourns a mother, a father, a brother and a sister dead of the pest in a single year.
The annals contain a first-person American record of the epidemic that preceded the conquest of Guatemala, told to the writer's children. In the course of the fifth year the pestilence began: first there was a cough, then the blood was corrupted and the urine became yellow, and the number of deaths was terrible. The chief Vakaki Ahmak died; on the day 14 Camey died the king Hunyg, the writer's grandfather, and two days afterward the counselor Balam, his father. The stench was such that men died of it alone, half the people threw themselves into the ravines, and the dogs and foxes lived on the bodies. "Thus did we become poor, O my children, and thus did we survive, being but a little child - and we were all that remained."
The extraction is itemised by the people who paid it. In one year frightful imposts were levied, gold and silver were paid before the face of Tunatiuh - Pedro de Alvarado - and five hundred men and five hundred women were demanded as tribute to go to the gold washings, with five hundred men and five hundred women demanded again to build Pangan for his residence: "All that, yes, all that, we ourselves witnessed, O my children." The king Belehe Qat died while employed in washing for gold, and his successor Don Jorge was appointed "by the sole command of Tunatiuh", with no council held nor assembly to confirm him. The tribute was laid on all the chiefs, even on the king himself.
The same annals record the remedy, and record it as relief rather than as propaganda, because the writers had no reason to flatter. In the course of a later year the prince Mantunalo arrived "to relieve the nation from its sufferings"; the washing for gold and silver promptly ceased, the tribute of young men and women ceased, the burnings alive and the hangings ceased, "and, indeed, all the various acts of violence of the Castilians and the imposts which they had forcibly laid upon us", and the roads were once more frequented by travelers as they had been eight years before, when the imposts were first laid. Within two paragraphs the same hand records that Tunatiuh came back from Castile with the position of commander, killed the Ah-tzib Caok on account of his lineage, and hanged the king Ahpozotzil Cahi Ymox. Relief and killing are in the same voice, a few lines apart.
The edition states a limit that any user of these passages has to carry. At page 188 a bracketed editorial note announces that from there Brinton appends only the translation of the remainder of what he believes to be the original work, "but as its contents are of little general interest, I omit the text" - so the sections on the imposts, on Mantunalo and on the hanging of Cahi Ymox appear in this volume in English only, with no facing Kaqchikel, and the section numbers are the editor's. The 1520 epidemic passage falls before that point.
The editor's estimate of the document is a nineteenth-century Americanist's and is recorded here as his own judgement rather than as fact: that both for its historical and its linguistic merits it is one of the most important documents in aboriginal American literature, written by a native who had grown to adult years before the whites penetrated to his ancestral home, displaying the language in its pure original form and preserving the tribal history and part of the mythology as they were current before they were in the least affected by European influences. He also acknowledges constant obligation to Brasseur de Bourbourg's manuscript version, from which he says he frequently differs.