Geronimo
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The passage is so matter-of-fact in tone that a reader could be forgiven for missing it. But in the space of about 200 words the author summarizes how a people became extinct simply by collaborating with a newly arrived people. I did some research about them and found that no pure Opatas are thought to be alive, and their language is dead. In the Mexican state of Sonora there are mestizos who know that some of their ancestors were Opata, but next to nothing of the Opata culture remains. This erasure took only 300 years.
The “Tlascaltecas” was another tribe I had never heard of until I read the above passage. I learned that they were longstanding rivals of the Aztecs, so were allies of the Spanish in the 16th century. For their loyalty, the Spanish crown gave them special privileges, and with that elevated status came miscegenation. Like the Opatas, there do not seem to be any pure Tlascaltecas left. Their Wikipedia page is entirely in the past tense. The language they spoke, Nahuatl, is still spoken because the Aztecs also spoke it. ...
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