The Monquis were the Native American inhabitants of the vicinity of Loreto, 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, at the time of Spanish contact. Probably first encountered by explorers traveling up the Gulf of California during the sixteenth century, they were subjected to some of the peninsula's earliest intensive Jesuit missionary efforts during the late seventeenth century. The Tyrolean Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino, together with Admiral Isidro Atondo y Antillón, unsuccessfully attempted to establish a mission at San Bruno on the northern margin of Monqui territory, in 1683-1685 (Bolton 1936). The first permanent mission in Baja California was founded at Loreto in 1697 by Juan María de Salvatierra

Juan María de Salvatierra

Juan María de Salvatierra was a Catholic missionary to the Americas.His family was of Spanish origin, the name being written originally Salva-Tierra. Born in Milan, Italy, he studied in the Jesuit college of Parma. It was there that he accidentally came across a book upon the "Indian missions,"...

.

Unfortunately, in contrast to many of their Jesuit colleagues, Kino and Salvatierra included relatively few notes on native ethnography in their letters and reports. Most of what is known about the aboriginal culture of the Monqui comes from incidental comments in explorers' accounts and at second hand in the works of the Jesuit historian Miguel Venegas (1757, 1979). The Monqui were hunter-gatherers who harvested a wide range of natural resources from the shores of the Gulf, as well as in interior valleys and the Sierra Giganta. They lacked agriculture, pottery, and metallurgy, and their social organization was evidently based on autonomous local communities that frequently fought one another. Traditional Monqui culture had probably disappeared before the end of the eighteenth century, under the impacts of mission acculturation and the decimation caused by Old World epidemic diseases.

The linguistic status of the Monqui is somewhat uncertain. William C. Massey (1949) thought that they had spoken a Cochimí

Cochimi

The Cochimí are the aboriginal inhabitants of the central part of the Baja California peninsula, from El Rosario in the north to San Javier in the south....

 language or dialect. A recent reassessment of the historical evidence suggests instead that their language was distinctive and non-Cochimí, possibly related to that of the Guaycura

Guaycura

The Guaycura were a native people of Baja California Sur, Mexico, occupying an area extending south from south of Loreto to Todos Santos. They contested the area around La Paz with the Pericú....

to the south (Laylander 1997).