Cochimi

The Cochimí were the hunter-gatherer people of the arid central Baja California peninsula, spread from El Rosario to San Javier. With no agriculture or metal, they roamed in autonomous small bands, living on desert game, shellfish and the seasonal pitahaya cactus fruit, whose seeds they recovered and roasted in a second harvest; shamans officiated in capes woven from donated human hair.

Their Cochimí speech forms the Yuman-Cochimí family together with the Yuman languages of the lower Colorado. Spanish seaborne explorers of the sixteenth century made the first fleeting contacts, and from 1699 the Jesuits built a mission chain from San Javier, reaching Santa María by 1767.

When the crown expelled the Jesuits in 1768 the Franciscans and Dominicans took over, but epidemics had already shattered the Cochimí communities, whose surviving families were absorbed into the mission settlements.