ABSTRACT
Containment is an act of colonialism. Borders are its weapons and bleeding its history. Using both physical borders and controlling rhetoric, colonizers re-imagined, and then reconfigured sites in the highlands of Guatemala into reflections of their own bounded ideas. The domination of the Maya has been a process of reenacting visions imagined through "historical and theological scripts" which were brought from Spain and transferred, along with the physical set of towns laid-out in a grid pattern, upon the theater of Central America. Those Maya places that do register within the defining and confining lines of Conquest were mainly the largest most populous sites. The writing of colonial history about Guatemala, in other words, cut primarily through key Maya settlements, making many of those settlements into Spanish ones, in history and in space. Writing and mapping divided the country into colonial partitions. Maya territory was subsumed into Spanish enclosures.
