Everything narrative that is known about Xibalba comes through one document. A Dominican friar, Francisco Ximenez, working in highland Guatemala at the beginning of the eighteenth century, copied out a K'iche' text in the Latin alphabet and set his Spanish translation beside it. That manuscript, after a long journey through private hands, is now in the Newberry Library in Chicago. No earlier written copy survives.
The text is therefore late, mediated by a missionary, and produced by K'iche' authors already writing under colonial rule, and every one of those facts affects how it should be read. What makes it more than a colonial curiosity is that the images in it are much older. Painted vases and carved monuments of the Classic period, some more than eight centuries before Ximenez, show the Hero Twins, the ballgame, the underworld lords and episodes recognisable from the narrative.
That correspondence is one of the better-attested cases of continuity in Mesoamerican studies. It means the story was in circulation long before the manuscript, that the manuscript preserves something real, and that the ball court, which is a physical structure at hundreds of sites, was not only a game. Xibalba is a place reached by playing, and the field is in the middle of the town.