Otomanguean

The Otomangueans, better known to history as the Otomi, are the principal Oto-Pamean people of central Mexico, scattered across the Hidalgo and Querétaro highlands, in towns such as Xilotepec; one valley group calls itself Hñähñu. Their ancestors were among the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt's earliest farmers and may have been the Valley of Mexico's first inhabitants, where Otomi speakers lived in Teotihuacan and later Toltec Tula.

After Teotihuacan fell, Nahua migrants pressed them east; around 1100 they built city-state Xaltocan, but the Mexica and their allies subdued them in the fourteenth century; the Tepanec drove them from the valley in 1418, and they became Aztec tributaries.

During the Spanish conquest the Otomi of Tlaxcala joined Cortés against Tenochtitlan, founded Querétaro and colonized the Bajío; Mezquital groups waged years of guerrilla resistance. By the 1530s their towns were parceled into encomiendas, though Indian republics and communal lands preserved their language; epidemics and resettlements like the 1711 transfer to San Luis Potosí thinned them.