Recording Territory, Recording History: Negotiating the Sociopolitical Landscape in Colonial Highland Maya Títulos Mallory E. Matsumoto, Brown University Abstract. The colonial-era documents commonly referred to as títulos were composed in Maya communities of the Guatemalan highlands in the context of significant societal change following the initial Spanish conquests in the region in 1524. Based on detailed analysis of five Nija’ib’ K’iche’ títulos and examples from other Highland Maya títulos, this article argues that the Highland Maya títulos served as instruments in negotiating power in the immediate community. As community records composed by indigenous scribes using the alphabet intro- duced by the colonizers, the títulos physically manifested their elite authors’ privileged access to literacy and their influence on local historiography. Further- more, the títulos redefined the sociopolitical landscape by integrating written records of territorial claims, historical events, social relationships, and political status into the dialogue of local-level power negotiations. Keywords. títulos, colonial Highland Maya Guatemala, community, power, identity Introduction: Highland Maya Títulos In Mesoamerican ethnohistory, a título (Spanish, “title”) constitutes a particular form of document written by and for indigenous communities during the colonial period to “conserve and transmit collective memory” and thus “sustain their identity and affirm the antiquity of their territorial possessions” being challenged by Spanish colonialism (Florescano 2002: 221; see, e.g., Megged 2009). 1 The present study focuses on five specific texts from the Highland Maya corpus, but similar títulos were also created Ethnohistory 63:3 (July 2016) doi 10.1215/00141801-3496779 Copyright 2016 by American Society for Ethnohistory Ethnohistory Published by Duke University Press