Coahuiltecan people is a collective name for the many small, autonomous bands of Native Americans who inhabited southernmost Texas, the Rio Grande valley and adjacent Mexico. The Coahuiltecans were hunter-gatherers. First encountered by Europeans in the sixteenth century, they became victims of disease and slavery or were killed during the long wars against the Spanish, criollo, Apache or other Coahuiltecan groups. The survivors were absorbed into the Hispanic population of southern Texas or northern Mexico.
In 1886, ethnologist Albert Gatschet found perhaps the last survivors of Coahuiltecan bands: 25 Comecrudo, 1 Cotoname, and 2 Pakawa. They were living near Reynosa, Mexico.
The name given to the Coahuiltecans derives from Coahuila, the state in which some of them lived. The word Coahuila derives from a Nahuatl word.
The Coahuiltecans lived in the flat, brushy, dry country of southern Texas, roughly south of a line from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Guadalupe River to San Antonio and hence westwards to around Del Rio. They lived on both sides of the Rio Grande. Their neighbors along the Texas coast were the Karankawa, and inland to their northeast were the Tonkawa, both tribes possibly related by language to some of the Coahuiltecans. To their north were the Jumano and, later, the Lipan Apache and Comanche. Their indefinite western boundaries were the vicinity of Monclova, Coahuila, and Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, and southward to roughly the present location of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, the Sierra de Tamaulipas, and the Tropic of Cancer. People of similar hunting and gathering livelihood lived throughout northeastern Mexico.