Toboso

The Toboso were an Indigenous people of the Bolsón de Mapimí, the desert basin straddling eastern Chihuahua and western Coahuila, whom the Spanish linked with the Jumanos of La Junta near Presidio, Texas and sometimes counted as part of that people. They hunted with lances and spoke a language marked by Tepehuán influence.

From the 1640s they raided Spanish missions and Tarahumara mines to their west, and even Toboso families settled in the Monterrey missions often abandoned them and rejected Christianity, earning the Spanish label of ladinos, Indians who understood colonial ways well enough to turn them against the colonists.

By 1800 the Toboso left in Mexico had merged into the mestizo population, while others fled to the Texas coast, appearing in the baptismal records of Mission Refugio as late as the 1820s and joining Karankawa refugees on Matagorda Island.