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.