Zacatecos Erotic

The Zacatecos were a Chichimeca people who lived on the high, dry plateau that is now the Mexican state of Zacatecas and the northeastern part of Durango. They were there before the Spanish arrived and into the early colonial period. War, mission life and intermarriage then absorbed them into the population of northern Mexico, where many of their descendants still live. Their name comes from Nahuatl. It is built on zacatl, grass, and usually means something like the people of the grass country. Outsiders gave them that name, and today it belongs to a state, its capital and everyone born there, nearly all of whom have never heard a word of the original language.

They lived in small bands that moved with the seasons, mostly by hunting and gathering: deer and rabbit, mesquite pods, and the fruit and pads of the prickly pear. The Aztecs lumped them together with the other northern nomads as Chichimecas, a word with the sense of wild or uncivilized, and Spanish writers adopted the term wholesale. Only a handful of words and place names survive from their language. It remains unclassified, though some have suggested a link to the Uto-Aztecan family, which includes the Tepehuan spoken to their west. Spanish writers described their warfare in detail and their beliefs hardly at all, so their religious life is mostly lost.

Everything changed in 1546, when a Spanish party found silver at the foot of the Cerro de la Bufa, deep in Zacateco territory. A mining boomtown rose within a few years, and a road to Mexico City followed, carrying silver south and supplies, livestock and settlers north. The Zacatecos and their Guachichil neighbors answered by raiding the wagon trains and ranches. By around 1550 the frontier had become the Chichimeca War, a forty-year fight between archers and armored Spanish cavalry that the colonial government could not win by force. It ended in the 1590s with what historians call peace by purchase. The Crown sent food, cloth and tools to bands that agreed to settle, sent Franciscan missionaries to live among them, and planted colonies of Tlaxcalan allies from central Mexico next to them as neighbors and examples.

The settlement worked, and it ended the Zacatecos as a separate people. Within a few generations of mission life, epidemics and intermarriage, the language fell silent and the bands disappeared from the record as distinct nations. What they left behind is quieter than a ruin: a place name, a frontier war that shaped how Mexico's north was settled, and ancestry carried by many families in Zacatecas, Durango and the country's big cities.