Coahuiltecan
ethnic group in the USA
The Coahuiltecans were a diverse grouping of various Indigenous peoples of Aridoamerica who lived in present-day northeastern Mexico and southern Texas. They once spoke a variety of possibly unrelated languages known as the Coahuiltecan languages. The various Coahuiltecan groups were originally nomadic hunter-gatherers.
First encountered by the Spanish in the 16th century, their population declined due to Eurasian diseases and numerous small-scale wars fought against the Spanish, Apache, and other Indigenous groups. After the Texas secession from Mexico, Coahuiltecan peoples were largely forced into harsh living conditions. In 1886, ethnologist Albert Gatschet found the last known survivors of Coahuiltecan bands: 25 Comecrudo, one Cotoname, and two Pakawa, living near Reynosa, Mexico.
The Coahuiltecans lived in the flat, brushy, dry country of northern Mexico and southern Texas, roughly south of a line from the Gulf Coast at the mouth of the Guadalupe River to San Antonio and westward to around Del Rio. They lived on both sides of the Rio Grande. Their neighbors along the Texas coast were the Karankawa, and inland to their northeast were the Tonkawa. To their north were the Jumano.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Coahuiltecan” is ethnic group in the USA. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Coahuiltecan, ethnic and group, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1104182. The Library of Congress control number is sh85027305. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1886.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coahuiltecan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.