Quems Erotic

The Quems were a small Native people who lived on both sides of the Rio Grande around present-day Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Coahuila, in the late 1600s and early 1700s. They no longer exist as a distinct community: within a few generations of Spanish contact they were absorbed into the mission populations of the river frontier, and whatever descendants they left are folded into the Mexican and Tejano families of the borderlands.

Nearly everything known about them comes from a handful of Spanish entries, where the name also appears as Quem, Cuem and Queme. The most consequential dates to 1689, when Alonso de León marched out of Coahuila to find the French colony that La Salle had planted on the Texas coast. A Quems man who said he had already visited the French settlement served as a guide, and the expedition reached the ruins of Fort St. Louis near Matagorda Bay. That detail says something about the Quems world: a band based on the middle Rio Grande had news, apparently firsthand, of strangers living a couple of hundred miles away on the Gulf.

Scholars file the Quems under Coahuiltecan, a label worth handling with care. It began as a linguistic guess that the hundreds of small bands of South Texas and northeastern Mexico spoke related tongues. That idea has not held up: the region held several unrelated languages, most of them lost with barely a word list. No sample of Quems speech survives, so the classification rests on geography rather than evidence. In practice the term describes a way of life. Small bands moved through the brush country by season, harvesting prickly pear fruit, mesquite beans, pecans and roots, hunting deer, rabbits and smaller game, and fishing the river. They gathered with neighbors for the all-night dances the Spanish called mitotes.

What ended them was the usual frontier arithmetic. Epidemics of smallpox and measles ran ahead of the missions, Spanish slave raids out of Nuevo León had worked the country to the south for generations, and Apache groups were pushing down onto the same hunting grounds. Mission San Juan Bautista, founded in 1700 at what is now Guerrero, Coahuila, stood a short way downriver, and some Quems are recorded entering it in the early eighteenth century. Mission life meant baptism, Spanish names, farm labor and marriage across band lines, and the name drops out of the record soon after. The Quems legacy today is modest but real: a line in the story of how Spain found La Salle's failed colony, and an unmarked share in the ancestry of the Rio Grande border towns.