The study of the ethnohistory of the Indigenous nations and their forms of knowledge or epistemes requires managing dense quantities of primary sources in manuscript and printed forms.1 Text mining tools can be used to analyze historical manuscript sources created for various purposes several centuries ago and found in different repositories to find patterns and conduct quantitative analysis. New critical and methodological perspectives are needed to gain a better understanding of the knowledge of the original groups that encountered European otherness during the Colonial period from these primary sources.

How can digital methods and techniques fostered by digital humanities scholarship help us better understand the Indigenous groups inhabiting the present-day Borderlands? This article attempts to answer part of this question by discussing the results of the first stage of Indigenous Epistemes of the Borderlands. A research project focused on the ethnohistory of the Coahuiltecan nations who lived in southeastern Texas and northeastern Mexico, in the current Mexican states of Coahuila and Nuevo León. While exploring Indigenous Epistemes—also understood as cosmovisions—of the Borderlands between Texas and Mexico during the Colonial period, the project created a digital collection of ethnohistoric primary sources related to the Native American people who lived in the San Antonio Missions and were evangelized by Spanish-speaking Franciscan friars during the 18th century, available now through Arte Público Press Digital (see Figure 1).

Specifically, the objectives of this project were as follows. First, the creation of a database of primary sources for conducting decolonial ethnohistorical studies of the Coahuiltecan nations mentioned in the 18th-century Manual for the administration of the sacraments. Second, the database was used to identify which Coahuiltecan nations were mentioned, how often, and in what places, years, and contexts. This information was used to create a map showing historical mobility in the cultural region of northeastern Mexico and southeastern Texas. Finally, the purpose was to analyze close readings of Coahuiltecan epistemes observable through textual evidence in ethnohistorical documents.

There are multiple difficulties in understanding the cosmovisions of these Indigenous nations. For instance, there is the diversity of ethnic denominations recorded in historical documents, the mobility patterns of the groups throughout the vast territory, and the complex processes of cultural assimilation that have occurred in the border region over time. These factors, among others, have diffused the region’s Indigenous heritage.

To understand the cultural region, the Indigenous nations’ denominations have been an important topic of discussion that resists the establishment of a relationship between these groups with their territory, sovereignty, and culture. According to Cramaussel, the long lists of group names collected by the Spanish during the Colonial period, the use of one term to refer to different groups because they share a language, the multiplicity of names resulting from the indigenous peoples’ need to separate into small groups for hunting and gathering purposes, the variations in orthography and changes over time of ethnic denominations, are all facts that have “bequeathed to us an immense terminological confusion that, given the absence of documents generated by the Indians themselves, greatly hampers our ability to chart processes of ethnogenesis” (143).

Therefore, our project’s main research problem is located at the intersection of language, territory, and ethnic denominations. To gain knowledge about the processes of ethnogenesis, we address the mobility of the northern groups in time and space as part of their relationship with the territory, a form of cultural expression and knowledge, and certainly, a result of historical processes like displacement in the context of violence by other Indigenous groups and pressured by Spanish attempts at conquest and pacification. Conversely, although our focus is on ethnohistorical records, we engage in dialogue with contemporary Coahuiltecan communities regarding their efforts to revitalize the language, historical discourse, and culture. Due to its natural interdisciplinarity, digital humanities are the field in which our project has flourished. Specifically, we connect our research to methodological debates in Digital Heritage, Indigenous Information Studies, Indigenous Digital Sovereignty, and Critical Infrastructure.2

The methods and perspectives of digital humanities, particularly the combination of distant and close reading approaches, enable research into the ethnohistory of Indigenous nations that have not been studied and have been historically marginalized in Colonial archives. Some of them, such as the Coahuiltecan nations, currently face significant challenges in their efforts to revitalize their languages and cultures. In 2026, Mexico’s Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation—the agency that manages research in the country—declared Digital Humanities a strategic priority, along with the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. This indicates the growing attention this field of study is receiving in the political and scientific agendas of countries in the Global South, which are seeking alternatives to maintain a decolonizing perspective amid an international geopolitical landscape that tends toward epistemic hegemony.

Scholars discussing Indigenous geographies in a Latin American context have highlighted the need to produce knowledge and projects of social and political relevance, beyond the scientific one. Collections are not defined solely by their items. Stevenson proposes that both the process of assemblage and the framing or contextualization of a collection present ways of seeing and understanding the world. By thinking from a decolonial perspective, we propose new ways of seeing old problems, hopefully bringing us to a closer understanding of ourselves and the world. Through our collection, which is composed mainly of Colonial archives, we seek not only to highlight the Colonial perspective from which they were written but, even more, to invite the public to read between the lines and search for the experiences of these First Nations during the Colonial period. As Denieul-Pinsky pointed out in conversation with Ana Pulido Rull, one advantage of Colonial archives is the quantity of documents available (32). One ultimate goal as researchers is to uncover the Indigenous Epistemes of the region, as we might encounter them in the limited corpus available (see Figure 2).

The dissemination of the ethnohistory of the Coahuiltecan nations will not only support current resurging Coahuiltecan descendant nations, but the region as a whole. Current work for libraries and archives regarding the Coahuiltecan nations will involve creating collections that make primary sources available to valorize the history and culture of these nations. We intentionally situate this project alongside other studies on the Borderlands to enrich us with a decentralized approach that allows us to start defining and exploring peripheral identities that transcend borders.3

This collection seeks to facilitate future ethnohistorical research that goes beyond traditional historical interpretations to elucidate the complexity of native mobility in the region comprising present-day Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Texas. We hope to redefine this pattern of movement as an integral part of Indigenous peoples’ worldview, linked to their understanding of territory and ecological balance, rather than reducing it to a mere subsistence strategy.4 In the first stage of the project, the mobility maps created relate time, space, and ethnic denominations (see Figure 3). The second phase of our research project will focus on the cosmovisions of the nations through a linguistic analysis. Nevertheless, the initial results of the epistemic analysis will be discussed in the following sections.

The main outcome of the project is to promote an understanding of the complex cultural processes in the Texas-Mexico borderlands by gathering and making available historical sources to the user community.5

The Indigenous nations that lived in the San Antonio missions during the Colonial period spoke several languages, including sign language. According to the Franciscan friar, Benito Fernández de Santa Ana, many different languages were spoken across the five missions, but four were predominant. The most common language was described as a rich and beautiful tongue, written using Italian phonetic rules and spoken with a Castilian tone. However, all the nations were able to communicate, as described by Fray Benito Fernández de Santa Ana:

Sign language is an example of a form of knowledge, or episteme, that is shared by Indigenous nations. Through it, they decoded, understood, and interacted with the world. It was also an expression of communality, of what brings different communities together. As defined by Pharao Hansen, language is an essential element of this political configuration that helps create communities at all scales, from the smallest local unit to broader intercommunity connections. The persistence of Indigenous languages is fundamental to the identity and organization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In this context, language is much more than a means of communication. It is the medium through which communal politics are conducted and the essential tool through which sovereignty is exercised (Hansen 30).

It is fundamental to clarify that community analysis is approached on multiple scales, from macro-linguistic communities to localized groups. Our focus on Coahuilteco speakers does not seek to equate their identities, but rather, it represents a starting point for the study of a historically marginalized and fragmented macro-community. Nowadays, the descendants of the Coahuiltecan nations face the challenges of contemporary geopolitical shift in the Borderlands. In Texas, for example, the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation have created the American Indians in Texas-Spanish Colonial Missions, an organization whose purpose is “the preservation and protection of the culture and traditions of the Native American tribes and other Indigenous people who resided in the Spanish Colonial missions” (American Indians in Texas). Since the early 2000s, they have been conducting linguistic revitalization activities with children, adults, and families. Meanwhile, no civil associations identifying as Coahuiltecan nations have been located in Mexican territory. Nevertheless, through this research, we have learned that the Alazapas were one of the most important Coahuiltecan nations in Nuevo León’s historical records. This finding will facilitate the study of the ethnogenesis process of the Coahuiltecan nations in Mexican territory.

The project’s starting point is the analysis, from a philological perspective, of the primary sources that preserve the historical Coahuilteco language. The corpus comprises three documents related to evangelization—a cultural process that took place during the Colonial period. The conversion of Indigenous people to Christianity was the main ideological justification for the occupation by Europeans. Without doubt, evangelization was a complex cultural phenomenon that enabled an epistemic colonization of Western worldview over Indigenous cosmovisions—the conquest of written culture over orality, for example. However, at the same time, the processes of contact between Indigenous cultures and Europeans were recorded in great measure by friars and missionaries devoted to evangelization. The paradox is clear: through the written records of the colonizers, we can access the cosmovision of the Indigenous nations.

As a result of contact between the Franciscan friars and the Indigenous peoples of the San Antonio Missions in the 18th century, we have three treatises today that recorded the Coahuilteco language. The corpus is integrated by a Manual for the administration of the sacraments authored by Friar Bartolomé García and printed in 1760, and two manuscripts, a confessor’s manual (Confessional) and a booklet (Cuadernillo).6 These three works are written in what Bartolomé García called the most spoken language of the region of Coahuila, Nuevo León and South Texas.7 Coahuilteco is one of the seven languages that both linguists, Swanton and Sapir, identified in the region as part of a family they denominated “Hokano-Coahuilteca.”8 In the 20th century, Troike contributed significantly to historical linguistics studies of the Coahuilteco language and recently, Acosta Rodarte also completed a Coahuilteco language reclamation program for his master’s dissertation.

The Manual for the administration of the sacraments is a bilingual work, written in double columns, on the left in Spanish and on the right in an Indigenous language spoken or known by the 18 nations, including the Alazapa nation, mentioned on the cover. A century later, the linguist Manuel Orozco y Berra would identify the language of the Manual for the administration of the sacraments with the one called Coahuilteco. Orozco y Berra and Francisco Pimentel gave the name “Texano-Coahuilteco” to the language spoken by Indigenous groups of Coahuila and Texas. For this, they use the Manual for the administration of the sacraments as the main source. Bartolomé García does not identify any Indigenous group as “Coahuilteco” (see Figure 4). Neither the word nor derivations of it appear in the two manuscripts, the Confessional and the Cuadernillo.

Thanks to the prologue of this work, especially the “Sentir,” signed by friar José Guadalupe Prado, theology lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross of Querétaro, we know that the Manual for the administration of the sacraments is written in “the most common language for all Franciscan conversions that they planted from the Mission called La Candela to those that border the mild banks of the San Antonio River, distant ends more than 100 leagues from one another.”9 These types of religious documents were produced during the Colonial period to help missionaries impart one of the most important sacraments in Christian doctrine: reconciliation.10

From these religious documents that preserved the language, we propose a decolonial perspective focused on ethnohistory to identify the systems of knowledge or epistemes of the Indigenous groups that spoke the Coahuilteco language. To identify patterns of mobility in the cultural region, we extracted the 18 ethnic denominations mentioned as Coahuiltecan nations. This list is neither exhaustive nor complete, as the friars may have misidentified some of the nations. Other Coahuiltecan communities may not be mentioned in this historical document. Nevertheless, it is a representative starting point for inquiring about specific Indigenous groups in the Colonial archive. This approach also allows us to implement a replicable methodology for researching the diversity of Indigenous nations in ethnohistorical records.

To create the digital collection and the ethnohistorical database, we developed a methodology that facilitates the study of a non-digitized corpus of historical documents. Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted a primary phase of distant reading on the corpus obtained for the archival work, employing text mining techniques. From that phase, we identified the documents that mentioned a certain Indigenous nation—the Alazapas. In the second phase of the methodology, we conducted a close-reading approach, based on hermeneutical analysis of the documents, to create a case study on the agency, adaptability, and alliances of the Alazapa nation, which persisted through the Colonial period.

To establish the corpus and create the digital collection, we selected the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) as the first repository to be researched. Here, we selected the Archivo General de Indias Collection, whose origins are related to the concept of the Spanish Borderlands. The renowned historian Herbert Eugene Bolton sought to include the disregarded Hispanic origins of the United States of America in the Borderlands in his historical assessment. He liked to translate and edit unpublished documents, and he did so profusely (Weber 185). At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of academics and their students from UT, led by Bolton, traveled to the General Archive of the Indies in Seville and to the General Archive of the Nation in Mexico City to type a selection of documents representative of the Borderlands. It is a collection that, from its conception, has a hermeneutic horizon on the construction of the imaginary of the Borderlands of Hispanic origin.

We reviewed the catalogs of the Archivo General de Indias Collection, whose documents are written in Spanish. In the first stage, we selected the boxes whose volumes included keywords related to our hermeneutical scope in their descriptions. We examine the volumes and selected documents of notable value, which illustrate important aspects of the epistemic conquest of the Borderlands. A general database was built that included files’ photographs, documents’ transcripts and metadata for each volume. The digitized corpus, 36 volumes spanning the 17th and 18th centuries was typed, not handwritten. The paleography was made by Bolton and his team a century ago.

What we digitized was the typed version, so for the Automated Text Recognition (ATR) of our documents, we utilized Transkribus. Working with the typed corpus was a key strength that mitigated the technical complexity and inherent constraints of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) outputs. We used the general Text Titan model for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The resulting Character Error Rate (CER) was deemed manageable. Our primary goal for the initial distant reading phase was to extract lemmas for the 18 specific Coahuiltecan nations we were tracking. The CER did not significantly constrain this particular task, as the distinctive spelling variations of the nation names were sufficiently discernible for extraction and subsequent verification.

Once the text had been extracted from the digitized documents, we selected the volumes to be edited and published in the digital collection. Simultaneously, we began to apply text mining techniques to the entire corpus automatically transcribed by Transkribus. For the analysis of our corpus, a variety of data mining tools were used, notably VoyantTools and RStudio, accompanied by the use of graphical representations in Sheets to visualize selected data. All documents were converted to .txt files, and the texts were cleaned using R. For some terms, RStudio tended to return lower frequencies than those reported by VoyantTools.

From the corpus, we identified the causes for which each nation appears mentioned in the historical records, the place it could be linked to, and the year either the document or the event was dated, if described. The number of mentions were counted and specified, and the coordinates were later identified using either actual archaeological remains or symbolic locations. To gather the most occurrences, for most ethnic denominations, only the lemma was searched in both RStudio and VoyantTools (see Figure 5). When it came to identifying mentions of the nations, both RStudio and VoyantTools presented the same results.

Text mining made it possible to identify the occurrence of mentions of the Coahuiltecan nations in the corpus we established from the archival work made in the Archivo General de Indias Collection. Documents that appeared as mentioning one of the nations through RStudio and VoyantTools were: volume 17 of the box 2Q136, volume 19 of the box 2Q136, volume 46 of the box 2Q140, volume 48 of the box 2Q141, volume 72 of the box 2Q145, volume 77 of the box 2Q146, and volume 80 of the box 2Q146 (see Figure 6).

By following the methodology described above, it was possible to move from a non-digitized printed archive to a corpus of documents in which some of the nations identified as Coahuilteco speakers — according to the primary linguistic source, the 18th-century Manual for the administration of the sacraments— are mentioned and described. The main result is the database, which contains complete historical documents associated with the Coahuiltecan nations and is connected to a specific place and time. This database was not available before; this is possibly the most important result of the project.

Through the database, we were able to construct geolocation maps that not only show where in the region each nation was mentioned, but also direct the user to the document where each mention occurred. The geolocation map with data we collected from our corpus is available through Google MyMaps for accessibility and interoperability (See Figure 7).

As for the collection, we chose digital tools based on what could help us expose three main components: text, geographical, and chronological data. The collection was published under Arte Público Press Digital, powered by Manifold (See Figure 8). The digital collection offers open resources for studying the culture of the Coahuiltecan nations. Based on distant reading and text mining results, a map links each Indigenous nation in geographical space to the ethnohistorical document that mentions it and the date it was produced. On the other hand, as a result of close-reading, the collection includes the digital editions of ethnohistorical documents written in Spanish that were selected for the high-value information they provide about the Indigenous nations of the Borderlands during the Colonial period.

For example, the document we titled “Cosmovision and Ethnohistory,” a memorial written by Antonio Ladrón de Guevara, describes the reason why Indigenous nations of Nuevo León return annually to a specific place for ritual funerary practices. When someone dies, the community bury them with their bow, arrows, and other belongings. One year after the death, during the fruit season, the group return to the burial site. They hold a celebration that lasts all day. During the gathering, they dance and sing. The Indigenous people say that the deceased descends from above and tells them that there are better deer and fruits to eat up there, and with that, they disappear in the same way they saw the deceased descend.11

The digital collection also includes a bibliometric analysis of mentions of Coahuiltecan nations in various Texas archival resources, mapped via VOSviewer. It also offers digitized linguistic primary sources, a beta Omeka repository, and a hyperlink to the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation website, which hosts their records and media.

Our results have limitations that must be considered to understand that this is an evolving, curated collection rather than a complete and comprehensive one. The first limitation to consider is written culture. Since the starting point of our research are the nations mentioned on the cover of the 18th-century Manual for the administration of the sacraments, nations that the friars did not include in the document have not been identified. On the other hand, some of the groups mentioned by the friars may have learned the Coahuilteco language as a second or third language.

Another trait of our work is the trilingual nature of our data. While it is a strength, it is also undoubtedly a challenge. The ethnohistoric documents are written in Spanish, while the primary linguistic sources are in Coahuilteco with Spanish translations. Our digital collection’s user interface and explanatory texts are in English. However, the digital editions are in the original language of the texts: Spanish. Therefore, currently, our collection requires an audience open to multilingual cultural heritage scenarios.

A third consideration of our results is that we only conducted archival research in one repository, the Briscoe Center at UT Austin. Thus, our map and results are limited to documents collected from this location. It is possible that nations not mentioned in this corpus are referred to in other repositories. Zero mentions of a nation does not mean non-existence; rather, it means that we must continue searching in other repositories using this methodology to broaden the representativeness of our results. In summary, our outcomes are the consequence of analyzing a sample and provide an initial critical examination of tracking mobility patterns and the presence of Coahuiltecan nations in the Colonial archive.

A distant reading approach allowed us to establish a database. From there, we were able to analyze the historiographical discourse in two volumes that contain information about the Alazapas. In the cover of the Manual for the administration of the sacraments the Alazapas are mentioned as one of the nations that spoke the language of the primary source (see Figure 9). Our particular interest in this nation is related to the process of evangelization that occurred in the region. Unlike other nations, such as the Mezcales/Mezcaleros, related to Apaches and Lipanes, who maintained a position of alliances and tensions, the Alazapas are more closely related in the primary sources to the establishment of missions. As we want to explore the role of religious practices in contact between the groups, the Alazapas represent a paradigmatic case of study. As early as the end of the 17th-century we found information about them in our corpus.

As a result of applying our methodology we found that by the end of the 17th-century the Alazapas are mentioned in the Province of Texas, Villa de Santiago, Monterrey, Nuevo Reino de León, and Villa del Saltillo, specifically associated with the San Antonio Galindo de Moctezuma Mission.12 As a result of the distant reading experiment, we provide a table of the occurrences in context of the word “Alazapas” that we found in the corpus (Figure 10).

Up to this point, we have conducted a distant reading approach. As we can see in the table of occurrences and context of the group’s mentions, the main theme of the documents is the religious life associated with the creation of a mission. As we know, the establishment of a mission implies the colonization of the culture and daily life of the Indigenous people. Missions were physical and cultural spaces in which the interchange of knowledge and cultural practices were held. The role of the mission as a place of acculturation is fundamental in the spread of Western culture among the native people of the Borderlands. Epistemes in contact are, without doubt, a characteristic of these symbolic spaces which are connected with the materiality of their time.

By a close-reading approach, that is, hermeneutics applied to the analysis of historical documents, we can state that the main subject of the representation of the Alazapas in the corpus of this research is the funding of the San Antonio Galindo de Moctezuma Mission in Coahuila by the end of the 17th century. Volume 19–2Q136 (1692) gathers the documents associated with the abandonment of the Mission of San Francisco de los Tejas. The volume includes the diary of travel that Diego Ramón and his soldiers took to get to the San Francisco Mission in Texas. The description of the territory is rich in images where dry rivers, oak trees, holm oaks, ravines, and hills follow one another in the landscape described. On several occasions, the party finds itself lost and it is thanks to the Indigenous people who accompany them that they manage to find their way. When they finally reached the mission, the return trip to the presidio is almost immediate in the narrative of events.

We obtain much more information about the state of the mission from the letters of Father Mazanet addressed to the viceroy and included in the volume. In them, the Franciscan requests authorization to abandon the mission. To do so, he argues several points that support the idea that the mission has failed. One of the main arguments is the persistence of the Indigenous groups’ beliefs related to the mission’s life. From this penchant for “idolatry” we get a very important description of the Indigenous groups from the northeastern cultural region’s cosmogony. Mazanet describes that the Indians continue to perform their funeral rituals in their traditional manner because it is fundamental to their beliefs about the afterlife. The friar describes that indigenous people, who have died baptized, after death have not wanted to be buried in Christian ground, but rather they relatives bury them in the fields according to their ceremonies. The family placed food and offerings inside the grave because they say that they are going to another land, both body and soul, which is evidence of beliefs in the afterlife.13

Likewise, in explaining the difference between the Spanish God and the Indigenous God, Mazanet describes the cosmos as a mythical space created by the ancestors according to the Indigenous cosmovision.

Now, the only specific mention we find of the Alazapas in this file occurs at the beginning of it and refers to a communication dated February 4, 1693, in which Gregorio de Salinas Varona, governor of Coahuila, warned the viceroy that the Alazapa nation was revolting against the Spaniards. No more is said about them. However, this volume accounts for very important aspects of the region’s evangelization and the difficulties the Franciscans faced. It offers ethnohistorical information on the cosmogony of the Indigenous groups of the northeastern cultural region.

As for volume 17 of the box 2Q136 (1698), we found the opposite case, as we move from the abandonment of a mission in Texas to the creation of a mission in Coahuila. According to the documents in the file, the Alazapas, Pedro and Joseph, presented themselves in the Villa de Santiago de la Monclova on July 4, 1698, before Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdés. With the help of the interpreter Félix Sánchez—though he could not write and therefore did not sign, owned a ranch at the time—Pedro and Joseph possibly in Coahuilteco declared to be servants of inhabitants of the city of Monterrey, whom they had abandoned because of the bad treatment they were receiving from their masters.

Therefore, they asked the governor of Coahuila for the foundation of a town where they and their allied nations—like the Carrizos—could live in peace and quiet. They asked for water and land, as well as the administration of doctrine and sacraments. In exchange, they swore obedience to the power of the king Charles II and their efforts as diplomats to maintain peace and friendship between the Spaniards and the Alazapas who had risen in the territory of Nuevo León, as well as with other Indigenous nations.

The governor of Coahuila, Cuervo y Valdés, took advantage of the opportunity offered for the settlement of the territory and its pacification. He granted peace, land, and water, naming the area destined for the Alazapa settlement Valle del Candamo. A few days later, with the families reunited, the Alazapas were pleased, according to the source. Fray Francisco Portales, commissioner of the missions, had a rudimentary chapel built in a hut in which the bell was placed, and to the sound of it, 160 Alazapas came out to attend the mass in commemoration of the foundation of the mission.

The fertile land, shown to the Alazapas, is explored. In a ritual of taking possession, “they walked through the land, pulled up grass and cut branches from the forest, they threw stones.”16 After establishing the boundaries of the town and mission, Cuervo y Valdés appointed the authorities that will form the Alazapa town council. “I appointed Pedro Alazapa as governor and Joseph Alazapa as his lieutenant in case of absence or illness, to whom I gave the insignia or staff so that he might be obeyed.”17 The priest commissioner appointed the preacher Father Bernardo de Rojas as a religious missionary for the administration of sacraments and doctrine. With this, the town and mission San Antonio Galindo de Moctezuma, in the jurisdiction of the province of Coahuila, New Extremadura, was founded in 1698.

On the eve of these events, more than 400 kilometers to the south, the Alazapas were protagonists, along with the Tlaxcaltecas and the Spanish, in the foundation of the town of San Miguel de Aguayo, now Bustamante, Nuevo León. In 1686, the Tlaxcaltecas from San Esteban del Saltillo and the Alazapas from Nuevo Reino de León founded San Miguel de Aguayo. The Alazapas abandoned the town from 1691 until 1709. During the 18th-century both nations shared natural resources although they lived in separate communities (Butzer 18). To this day, there is a neighborhood in Bustamante called “Barrio Alazapa,” known in the 18th-century as San Antonio de los Alazapas.

The Alazapas were involved in daily life in the town of San Miguel de Aguayo. In fact, they were drafted to defend the village in the case of attacks by other Indigenous nations. In 1720 a call of arms was published “I command all residents of this town to appear in the name of His Majesty with their weapons and horses on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of this month, as well as those from the Alazapas neighborhood with their bows and arrows and shields to inspect and display in the royal houses, as is customary every year, their offensive and defensive weapons.”18 By 1775, the list of milicianos of San Miguel de Aguayo mentions the names of the vecinos Alazapas, and the arms with which they contribute to the defense of the village: “.... including in this list the residents of the Alazapas neighborhood, as they have always assisted in invasions and other services for our lord the King, together with the Tlaxcaltecas, with the weapons declared herein.”19

The captain of the Alazapas, Joseph Antonio de los Santos, presented bow, arrows, and adarga, while Antonio González offered bow, arrows, and shield (chimal). Other men just presented themselves without any weapon—José Bentura Flores, Francisco Arredondo, Don Pedro Luis de Anda, among others. The term “vecino” describes not only an inhabitant of the town, but also a civil, social, and legal status involving rights, obligations, and privileges within the community (García García).

The Alazapas played a role characterized by integration with the Nahua people, the Tlaxcaltecas, and the Spanish. They were integrated into the religious, military, and daily life of villages such as San Miguel de Aguayo. With this, we see the role of agency among the Alazapa nations; they are part of the religious, military, and social life of the Novo-Hispanic Septentrion and manifest actions that demonstrate their agency, courage, and adaptation amid changes in the territory and culture. A case study that adheres to the main findings and lines of thought of the most recent works on Indigenous Borderlands scholarship (Rivaya-Martínez).

Through our analysis of close and distant readings based on our experience creating the digital collection, we identified examples of Indigenous Borderlands epistemes manifesting through historical discourse during the Colonial period: Knowledge of the territory to navigate it differently depending on the season; mobility patterns in the territory associated with funeral rites and beliefs in the afterlife related to food gathering; language and orality as a means of agency based on translation processes between Indigenous and European groups; diplomatic strategies to improve living conditions amid political and military changes.

The project Indigenous Epistemes of the Borderlands advances the field of decolonial ethnohistory by serving as a methodological model and a direct resource for descendant communities. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines distant reading (text mining) and close hermeneutic analysis, we have successfully created an initial database that tracks the historical presence, mobility, and alliances of Coahuiltecan nations in the Colonial archive.

This project aims to create a database of Colonial primary sources to map the historical mobility and presence of Coahuiltecan nations across northeastern Mexico and southeastern Texas. By combining data-driven mapping with close textual analysis, the study seeks to reconstruct Indigenous Epistemes and provide a decolonial perspective on these communities. In this regard, the objectives of this work have been met, as the database has been created from the established corpus of archival work conducted at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The establishment of this database enabled the creation of the mobility map that is available in Indigenous Epistemes of the Borderlands, published by Arte Público Press. On this map, we identify the movement of the Coahuiltecan nations through the historical cultural region of northeastern Mexico and southeastern Texas, as documented in the corpus of ethnohistoric documents. Likewise, the distant reading approach allowed us to identify the importance of the Alazapa nation, with which a close reading analysis was carried out that allowed us to detect textual evidence about Coahuiltecan epistemes regarding knowledge of the territory, and sacralization of mobility patterns associated with funeral rites and beliefs, language and orality, and diplomatic strategies and alliances.

The integration of descendant communities in the research process highlighted the challenges of linguistic revitalization. When presenting the project to members of the Coahuiltecan community in San Antonio, the participants noted that the interest of new generations in learning the Coahuilteco language stems from a search for roots and the possibility of accessing a worldview different from that of dominant languages, allowing them to imagine the experience and thought of their ancestors through the appropriation of the language.

What remains for future research is a second stage of the project that contributes to the restitution of linguistic heritage. This connection with descendants has made it clear that, to achieve a deeper community commitment, our digital infrastructure must evolve toward interfaces that prioritize the visualization and retrieval of specific linguistic data, facilitating its reappropriation in the community. As we conclude this first phase, we reaffirm that the value of a decolonial ethnohistory lies in its ability to connect the epistemes documented in the 18th-century with current processes of recovering a worldview.

On the other hand, the methodology of our case study is oriented toward Indigenous information studies, with an approach to non-digitized archives to study nations whose histories and ethnohistories have not been addressed by the canon. The analysis of other nations in this corpus is a task to be carried out in the future, as was done on this occasion with the case study of the Alazapas.

In particular, the case of the Indigenous history of the city of Monterrey and the state of Nuevo León requires a recovery of the Coahuiltecan root, which, together with the Tlaxcalteca of Nahua origin, built the cultural identity of the region. In this order of ideas, the project faces a new stage of design and development of an advanced digital infrastructure for the study, preservation, and dissemination of Indigenous epistemologies of northeastern Mexico during the Colonial period. Through the digitization, transcription, and analysis of documents from key collections, structured databases and datasets must be generated to make possible research into the forms of knowledge, territoriality, and worldview of the region’s Indigenous nations.

The development of this infrastructure will not only generate new academic knowledge but also strengthen open access to primary sources for academic, educational, and Indigenous communities. Digital humanities projects of documentary cultural heritage that face the challenges of developing in the heart of the Global South, with the infrastructure limitations that this implies, require a mixed-methods approach. A distant reading allows the establishment of patterns in the textual corpus, to later approach from a close hermeneutic reading that allows for the interpretation of documents in their context.

In the historical and social processes of Latin American countries, digital history, public digital humanities, and the ethnohistory of Indigenous peoples have the potential to reshape the Colonial historical discourse through access to documents and historical data intelligence. Digital humanities offer the possibility of decolonizing Indigenous history by enabling searches, identifying patterns, and creating visualizations in large volumes of data. They allow specific questions to be asked from decolonial perspectives in order to reconstruct a historical discourse that places the diverse forms of knowledge of Indigenous nations at the center. In the case study of the digital collection for Coahuiltecan ethnohistory, we have shown how an archive can be decolonized on a limited budget, using frugal tools and maintaining a balance between academic rigor, experimentation, and respectful dialogue with the community. This case study is also an example of cultures and nations located in border territories, now governed by two or more countries, and the challenges they face in their processes of permanence and cultural revitalization.

In conclusion, this digital collection stands as a testimony to the historical cultural region that persists beneath current political boundaries. The tension between the invisibility of these historical nations in Mexican territory and the processes of linguistic revitalization in the southeastern United States reveals the profound complexity of our shared past and the continuing relevance of cross-border cultural factors that, to this day, shape the constitution of the American continent. Thus, the archive transcends its technical function to become a decolonial tool and a bridge toward the restitution of the shared knowledge of a historical cultural region.