Cuyuteco

The Cuyuteco people, also known as Cuyuteca, was a tribe of the Nahua culture, that lived primarily in the Pre-Columbian Mixtlan region of Xalisco, in the present day state of Jalisco in western central Mexico. The Nahua are one of the main cultural groups of Mesoamerica.

History

The Cuyuteca were a Late Postclassic period group, with estimated 12th century arrival in the Xalisco region. From the migration period, and the Cuyuteco language a Uto-Aztecan Nahuatl language, they appear descended from ancient Nahua peoples that originated in Aridoamerica, in the deserts of present-day northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States.

After the 1521 Spanish conquest of central Mexico, the cultural suppressions brought by religious Indian Reductions, and the administrative impacts after the 1531 establishment of the Spanish colonial El Nuevo Reino de Galicia autonomous kingdom in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico), the Cuyuteca became extinct as a cultural group by the close of the 16th century.

Their population, largely depleted by 19 major epidemics of European diseases in the 16th century, was partially repopulated by Spaniards and Indian settlers from Guadalajara and other parts of New Spain.

Present day

Archaeological sites are in and around the present day towns of Tecolotlán, Tenamaxtlán, Juchitlán, Atengo, and Atenguillo in Jalisco; and Valle de Banderas in Nayarit.

See also

• Aztlán — legendary ancestral home
• Indigenous peoples of Mexico
• Mesoamerican chronology
• Uto-Aztecan languages

References

• Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Eric Van Young, "The Indigenous Peoples of Western Mexico from the Spanish Invasion to the Present: The Center-West as Cultural Region and Natural Environment," in Richard E. W. Adams and Murdo J. MacLeod, The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume II: Mesoamerica, Part 2. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 136–186.