The Guaycura were a native people of Baja California Sur

Baja California Sur

Baja California Sur , is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. Before becoming a state on October 8, 1974, the area was known as the South Territory of Baja California. It has an area of , or 3.57% of the land mass of Mexico and comprises...

, Mexico, occupying an area extending south from south of Loreto to Todos Santos. They contested the area around La Paz

La Paz, Baja California Sur

La Paz is the capital city of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur and an important regional commercial center. The city had a 2010 census population of 215,178 persons, but its metropolitan population is somewhat larger because of surrounding towns like el Centenario, el Zacatal and San Pedro...

 with the Pericú

Pericúes

The Pericú were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape Region, the southernmost portion of Baja California Sur, Mexico...

.

The Guaycura may have come into contact with the Spanish

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 at La Paz as early as the 1530s. Over the following century and a half, they had sporadic encounters with maritime expeditions on the peninsula's coasts. Jesuit missions that drew some of their neophytes from the Guaycura included La Paz (1720), Dolores (1721), Todos Santos (1733), and San Luis Gonzaga (1737). The Guaycura were implicated in the ill-fated Pericú Revolt against the Jesuits in 1734, and they underwent a steep demographic decline during the second half of the eighteenth century. They were probably extinct culturally by around 1800.

A fair number of explorers and missionaries left brief ethnographic notes concerning the Guaycura. The most detained accounts were written by the Alsatian Jesuit Johann Jakob Baegert

Johann Jakob Baegert

Johann Jakob Baegert was a Jesuit missionary at San Luis Gonzaga in Baja California Sur, Mexico...

, stationed at San Luis Gonzaga between 1751 and 1768 (Baegert 1772, 1952, 1982). Baegert took a decidedly sour view of his charges, at one point characterizing them as "stupid, awkward, rude, unclean, insolent, ungrateful, mendacious, thievish, abominably lazy, great talkers to their end, and naïve and childish" (Baegert 1952:80). His views as to the extreme simplicity of Guaycura social organization and belief systems have often been accepted as factual, but they may owe something to the missionary's own acerbic personality and to the several decades of cultural change that had preceded his arrival in Baja California (cf. Laylander 2000).

The Guaycura language

Guaycura language

Guaycura is an extinct language of southern Baja California. The Jesuit priest Baegert documented words, sentences and texts in the language between 1751 and 1768.-Classification:...

is attested by a few texts, but the evidence is not enough to classify it. It is not closely related to other known languages.