A CCOMPANYING the recent growth of Latin-American studies there has been an interest in reixamining and remapping the tribes and languages of Middle America. Baja California has been neglected in this work because the native population, with a few minor exceptions in the north, waned to extinction by the eighteenth century.' Furthermore documents for the reconstruction of these tribal and linguistic divisions form a body of material which is unrelated, in the main, to other such studies for Mexico. But it is only by the use of this documentation that we can arrive at boundaries and relationships for the aboriginal groups of Baja California. It is fortunate for such a study that the conquest of the peninsula was largely spiritual. From the end of the seventeenth century, when the Jesuit order was given a free hand in establishing Spanish control in Baja California, we have a well-documented record of native life and groups. These Indians were not subjected to the explosive and devastating contacts with mining and the encomiendas of the mainland. Save for the violence which marked sixteenth and seventeenth