La Región
There are three distinct pre-Columbian cultural-geographical regions in what is now Mexico and the southwestern United States: Oasisamerica, Mesoamerica, and Aridoamerica.
Aridoamerica describes a vast cultural and ecological region of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. It includes the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and the people, animals, plants, and cultures within it. It particularly encompasses the arid dry regions of these deserts. Indigenous peoples of this region were largely nomadic, hunter-gather peoples who moved throughout the landscape seasonally.
Oasisamerica is situated in the midst of Aridoamerica, in what we know today as the Four Corners region all the way down into Chihuahua. This region is surrounded by mountains and is on a slight plateau, providing fertile land for agriculture. Indigenous peoples of this region were sedentary agrarians.
Mesoamerica describes the verdant region of southern central North America including Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Mesoamerica is famous for its complex and well documented cultures and pantheon of deities. This is the birth place of the Maya and Mexica and many others who were practicing advanced agricultural systems.
La gente
It is important to note that the cultures throughout the Americas were completely different than anything Europeans had encountered before they arrived here. So their depictions of us, the ways they categorized us, named us, wrote down our languages and tried to understand our religious and cultural beliefs - is considerably different from what the truth actually was. Hundreds of years later, we are left to piece together the remains of what’s been taken from us. We are constantly reminding ourselves to read between the lines of these Eurocentric narratives and descriptions.
We understand that ancestrally, native peoples from what is considered Aridoamerica or the present day northern deserts of Mexico and the American southwest, were primarily hunter gatherer peoples who moved throughout the fluctuating seasons of the arid desert climates. This region has been coined many things, including La Gran Chichimekah (lower region of Aridoamerica). There vast numbers of tribes, bands, and clans of people throughout the deserts. Many of us share language, culture, art styles, spiritual beliefs but vary in lifeways and relation to one another.
Our lineages start in the lower Gran Chichimekah and have extended north along the Rio Grande and it’s banks into the northern Mogollon region of Aridoamerica.
This is an archive of our histories, ancient and recent. A record of what has happened to us, and what we are now doing. A body of work for our children, and the generations after them to continue to work on and claim as their own. We pray that this work allows people like us to reclaim our identities and push back against the assimilation and erasure inflicted onto us for centuries.
