This chapter talks about the history of the indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast. It focuses on the modern-day geographical territory of Veracruz. The jurisdiction of Misantla seems to be the most extensive area of Totonac speech. The Gulf Coast populations were devastated by the Spanish presence, a combination of disease, Spanish atrocities, and enslavement and deportation to the Antilles, although the impact was by no means homogeneous throughout the region. The process of evangelization in the Gulf Coast region and indigenous responses to Catholicism during the colonial period is poorly studied. The eighteenth century witnessed considerable economic growth in Mexico, a characteristic of which was the incorporation of peripheral regions into a wider market economy, and an increase in the power of the colonial state. Such growth resulted in increased conflict between Spanish and indigenous communities, and the Gulf Coast is no exception, although the conflict was confined to particular zones.

The central Mexican peoples were fairly homogeneous in language and culture. For the indigenous peoples of central Mexico, the Conquest marked the breakup of the superstructure of the Aztec empire, but many of the component polities became bastions of indigenous social, economic, and political life under Spanish Colonial rule. Like the Spanish colonial political organization, which was built on existing native patterns, the structure of the Spanish religious structure also was. In the colonial period class divisions and family structure changed. Central Mexican native society at the time of the Conquest was divided between elites and commoners, with gradations of status within these two categories. Early sources in Spanish describing prehispanic land tenure delineate a number of different categories of land. Some major shifts occurred in the colonial period in economic relations, particularly in economic exchanges. The importance of shifts within the Nahuatl language in the colonial period has been postulated as indicators of shifts in native culture.

This chapter discusses the key elements in the history of the native peoples in northeastern Mexico since the Europeans, particularly Spanish, began invading the region around the year 1545. Before that time, the northeast lay beyond the vague line that separated the settled, agriculturalist civilizations of Mesoamerica from the bewildering variety of indomitable hunting-and-gathering peoples known collectively to central Mexicans as Chichimecs. The key elements in this history of conquest include ethnocide, the fate by and large of the indigenous people of the region; the mass migrations, planned and unplanned, that brought in Purepechas, Otomis, Mexicanos, and Tlaxcalans from Middle America to acculturate or replace the local 'barbarians'. Accusations of inhuman cruelty, and especially of cannibalism, were routinely used in the early years of Spanish colonization of the northeast, roughly 1545 to 1590 in the southern part of the region, and lasting into the seventeenth century in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon.