Compared with Mexico and Peru, the colonial experience in Central America, period by period, place by place, remains elusively beyond our knowledge. General works such as those by Murdo MacLeod and William Sherman serve effectively as important frames of reference, but neither scholar would claim his contribution to be anything more than a foundation upon which further research must be built. MacLeod in particular recognizes this, emphasizing that “research on colonial Guatemala has hardly begun.” Declaring the field to be “almost limitless,” he identifies unequivocally the priorities of future research: “One should begin by establishing the geographical context and by putting people into it.” Our intent in this chapter, and the larger work it precedes, could not be worded more succinctly.

The geographical context we wish, if not to establish, at least to explore, is the area of Spanish dominion known in the mid-sixteenth century as the “términos y jurisdicción” of Santiago de Guatemala. Today, such a territorial unit would embrace the Republic of Guatemala, excluding the northern department of El Péten, with some overspill east into El Salvador and west into Chiapas (Figure 2.1). Not the environs of the colonial capital itself but how place arrangements within its jurisdiction came into existence form the focus of inquiry. People may be put into this geographical context a number of ways. The way we choose to project them, Spaniards as well as Indians, is by looking at how each adapted to the other during the complex process of population movement and community formation referred to as congregación.