Caxcan

The Caxcan were a partly sedentary, partly nomadic people of the southern Sierra Madre, holding what is now southern Zacatecas and northern Jalisco, with chief towns at Teul, Tlaltenango, Juchipila and Teocaltiche. They lived in competing city-states under elected tlatoani and spoke a Uto-Aztecan tongue often described as an old variant of Nahuatl.

In 1540 their leader Tenamaztle led them into the Mixtón Rebellion beside the Zacatecos; Spanish accounts called the Caxcan the heart of the rising, which was nevertheless crushed in 1542.

They then made peace and, unlike their former allies, fought on the Spanish side through the Chichimeca War of 1550 to 1590, which exposed them to raids by Zacateco and Guachichil bands. Warfare, epidemics and intermarriage over the following colonial centuries gradually merged most Caxcan communities into the mestizo population of Zacatecas and Jalisco.