Tamaulipas

Tamaulipas, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tamaulipas, is one of Mexico’s 31 states, which together with Mexico City make up the country’s 32 federal entities. It lies in northeastern Mexico, bordering Nuevo León to the west, San Luis Potosí to the southwest, Veracruz to the southeast, the U.S. state of Texas along a 370-kilometer (230-mile) stretch to the north, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east. The state is divided into 43 municipalities. Its capital is Ciudad Victoria, while its largest cities include Reynosa, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, Tampico, and Mante.

The name Tamaulipas comes from the Huastec term *Tamaholipa*. The prefix *tam-* means “place (where),” but scholars disagree on the meaning of *holipa*; “high hills” is a common guess. Another theory holds that the name derives from *Ta ma ho’lipam*, meaning “place where they pray a lot,” a reference to the Lipan Apache people.

People have lived in what is now Tamaulipas for at least 8,000 years. Over that time, several distinct cultures—north coastal, south coastal, lowland, and mountain—have risen and fallen. The region was originally home to nomadic Chichimec groups, sedentary Huastec peoples, and other hunter-gatherer and fishing tribes who were not Chichimec.

By the mid-18th century, the area called Nuevo Santander—covering what is now South Texas and Tamaulipas—was inhabited by many tribes. In the southwest, along the Sierra Madre, lived the Pisones, Siguillones, Janambres, and Pames. Just north of Soto la Marina were the Aracates, Maratines, and Damiches. In the Sierra de Tamaulipa Oriental were the Anancanaes, Mariguanes, Monanas, Palalguepes, Pasitas, Simariguanes, and Verjaranos. The valleys of that same sierra held the Aribay, Tagualitos, Comecamotes, Aracates, Inapanames, and Tumapacanes. The northern part of the sierra was home to the Canaines, Borrados, Guijolotes, and Cadimas. On the coast between Soto la Marina and Tampico lived the Anancana, Aretines, Carimariguayes, Carimariguanes, Cataicanes, Mapulcana, Moraleños, Panguayes, and Zapoteros. Southwest of Tamaulipa Occidental were the Tamaulipecos and Malincheños. North of the Rio Grande and south of the Nueces River were the Pintos, Comecrudos, Texedenos, Quinicuanes, and two of the most famous groups, the Comanches and the Apaches.

Spain took a gradual approach to subduing Tamaulipas’s inhabitants during the 16th and 17th centuries. The first permanent Spanish settlement in the area was Tampico, founded in 1554. Franciscan missionaries established further settlements, and widespread cattle and sheep ranching boosted the local economy while pushing native peoples off their ancestral lands. Repeated indigenous uprisings kept the region unstable and dampened colonial interest. In 1746, the area became a separate province of New Spain called Nuevo Santander. Its capital moved over time from Santander to San Carlos and finally to Aguayo. The province stretched from the San Antonio River in the northeast to the Gulf of Mexico, south to the Pánuco River near Tampico, and west to the Sierra Madre. The region became a refuge for rebellious Indians fleeing increased Spanish settlement in Nuevo León and Coahuila.

In 1784, under Escandón, Nuevo Santander annexed San Antonio de los Llanos and its dependencies on the Purificación lagoon, along with several ranches on the right bank of the Rio Grande that had belonged to Nuevo León. New settlements were founded, and the string of towns along the Rio Grande—Laredo, Revilla, Guerrero, Mier, Camargo, and Reynosa—became known as the *villas del norte*, or northern towns. These were key to Escandón’s plan for pacifying and colonizing the province, serving as a defensive line for larger population centers in the Mexican interior and as a way to introduce Spanish “civilization” to local indigenous groups. The modern border between Tamaulipas and Nuevo León likely follows old mesquite posts.

In the mid-17th century, Apache bands from the Southern Plains, after acquiring horses from Europeans in New Mexico, moved southeast into the Edwards Plateau, displacing native hunting-and-gathering groups. One such group was the Lipan. After 1750, when Comanche displaced most Apache groups from the Central Texas highlands, the Apaches moved into the coastal plain of southern Texas. Europeans in the San Antonio area then began calling all Apache groups in southern Texas Lipan or Lipan Apache. Many Indian groups in the missions of southern Texas and northeastern Mexico, recently displaced by the Lipan Apaches’ southward push, remained hostile toward Apaches and allied with local Spanish authorities against their common enemy.

By 1790, Europeans had shifted their focus from local aboriginal groups to containing the Apache invaders. In northeastern Coahuila and adjacent Texas, Spanish and Apache displacements created an unusual ethnic mix, with local Indians mingling with displaced groups from Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Texas. Some groups, seeking to escape the pressure, combined and migrated north into the Central Texas highlands.

After Mexico’s War of Independence from Spain and the fall of the Mexican Empire, Tamaulipas became one of the 19 founding states of the new United Mexican States in 1824. The 1824 Constitution formally abolished slavery. During the struggles between centralists and federalists...