Sierra Gorda in the context of "Huasteca"

Querétaro, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Querétaro, is one of the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It is divided into 18 municipalities. Its capital city is Santiago de Querétaro. It is located in north-central Mexico, in a region known as Bajío. It is bordered by the states of San Luis Potosí to the north, Guanajuato to the west, Hidalgo to the east, México to the southeast and Michoacán to the southwest.

The state is one of the smallest in Mexico, but also one of the most heterogeneous geographically, with ecosystems varying from deserts to tropical rainforest, especially in the Sierra Gorda, which is filled with microecosystems. The area of the state was located on the northern edge of Mesoamerica, with both the Purépecha Empire and Aztec Empire having influence in the extreme south, but neither really dominating it. The area, especially the Sierra Gorda, had a number of small city-states, but by the time the Spanish arrived, the area was independent from imperial powers. Small agricultural villages and seminomadic peoples lived in the area. Spanish conquest was focused on the establishment of Santiago de Querétaro, which still dominates the state culturally, economically and educationally.

Chichimeca (Spanish: [tʃitʃiˈmeka] ) is the name that the Nahua peoples of Mexico generically applied to nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who were established in present-day Bajío region of Mexico. Chichimeca carried the same meaning as the Roman term "barbarian" that described Germanic tribes. The name, with its pejorative sense, was adopted by the Spanish Empire. "For the Spanish, the Chichimecas were a wild, nomadic people who lived north of the Valley of Mexico. They had no fixed dwelling places, lived by hunting, wore little clothing and fiercely resisted foreign intrusion into their territory, which happened to contain silver mines the Spanish wished to exploit." Chichimeca was used as a broad and generalizing term by outsiders, writing, "[it] was used by both Spanish and Nahuatl speakers to refer collectively to many different people who exhibited a wide range of cultural development from hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists with sophisticated political organizations." They practiced animal sacrifice, and they were feared for their expertise and brutality in war.

The Chichimeca War (1550–1590) ended with the Spanish making favorable peace terms with the Chichimeca. Spanish/Chichimeca interaction resulted in a "drastic population decline in population of all the peoples known collectively as Chichimecas, and to their eventual disappearance as peoples of all save the Pames of San Luis Potosí and the related Chichimeca-Jonaz of the Sierra Gorda in eastern Guanajuato." In modern times, only one ethnic group is customarily referred to as Chichimecs, namely the Chichimeca Jonaz, a few thousand of whom live in the state of Guanajuato.

The north Pame, or Xi'iuy (alternate spelling: Xi'úi, Xi'ui, Xi'oi, or Xiyui), as they refer to themselves, the south Pame, or Ñáhu, Nyaxu (in Hidalgo), and the Pame in Querétaro or Re Nuye Eyyä, are an Indigenous people of central Mexico primarily living in the state of San Luis Potosí. When Spanish colonists arrived and conquered their traditional territory in the sixteenth century, which "extended from the modern state of Tamaulipas in the north to Hidalgo and the area around Mexico City in the south along the Sierra Madre," they renamed "the area Pamería, and applied the name Pame to all of the peoples there."

Estimates for population of the Pames at the time of contact with Spanish colonists in 1519 range between 40,000 and 70,000. In 1794, the population was estimated at 25,000. Recent figures for the Pame have estimated the population to be approximately 10,000 people. The Pames, along with the Chichimeca-Jonaz of the Sierra Gorda in eastern Guanajuato, are the only two intact cultural groups "of all the peoples known collectively as Chichimecas" who have survived colonization.