author

Francisco Hernández Arana Xajilá

d. 1581

A Kaqchikel Maya nobleman and chronicler, he is best known as one of the authors of the Memorial de Sololá—also called the Annals of the Cakchiquels—a rare Indigenous account that preserves both ancestral tradition and the upheaval of the Spanish conquest.

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The Annals of the Cakchiquels

The Annals of the Cakchiquels

by Francisco Hernández Arana Xajilá

About the author

Writing in Kaqchikel with the Latin alphabet after the early colonial conversion campaigns, he helped create one of the most important surviving Indigenous histories from Guatemala. The Memorial de Sololá combines mythic origins, dynastic memory, and political history, giving readers a view of the Kaqchikel world from within rather than through a Spanish chronicler's eyes.

Sources available here describe him as a member of the ruling Xajil lineage and a witness to the conquest era. His section of the chronicle is generally dated from about 1560 to 1583, and the work was later continued by his grandson Francisco Rojas.

Because so little personal biographical information survives, his lasting importance comes above all from the text itself: a vivid record of memory, identity, and survival in the first generations after conquest.