Title Pending

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.During the XVIII century, the Coahuiltecan language was spoken by various Indigenous nations who lived a nomadic lifestyle in the territory of nowadays South Texas, United States, and the Mexican States of Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. A comprehensive linguistic corpus of the Coahuiltecan language, along with the names of the nations of its speakers, has been obtained from a set of religious documents produced around 1760 in the Franciscan missions of San Antonio, Texas. Following the trail of the 18 Indigenous nations mentioned by the religious documents, we created the digital project titled "Indigenous Epistemes of the Borderlands" in the US Center for Latino Digital Humanities of the University of Houston. The primary purpose was the development of digital infrastructure that facilitates the study of the ethnohistory of the Coahuiltecan-speakers nations. The decolonial perspective in the ethnohistorical analysis is fundamental for understanding the territory as a cultural region in which the Indigenous nations shared forms of knowledge or epistemes. By actively collecting and digitizing sources corresponding to the nations, we began to build a navigable digital collection that will constitute a documentary base that revitalizes these nations cultural understanding and epistemes. The digital dimension of the collection makes these archives available to audiences that previously had limited access. The collection provides an open-access alternative to looking at the archives as a catalogued and mapped whole to understand Coahuiltecan-speaking nations. Multiple digital tools were utilized, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), text mining tools, Geographic Information System (GIS) software, and editing platforms. Each tool was used for its purpose, such as transcribing, summarising, identifying, locating. Continuous exploration was conducted to find the most valuable tools for making a digital collection like this one available.The first documentary repository in which the methodology was applied was the Archivo General de Indias Collection, located at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. The collection, formed by the historian Eugene Bolton, his colleagues, and students in the first decades of the 20th century, is fundamental for Bolton's historiographical concept of Borderlands. Furthermore, allowing us to reflect on the ways we create and understand the history of this territory. Our methodology enabled the identification of the Alazapas and the Mezcales as the two nations of Coahuiltecan-speakers most highly mentioned in the corpus, derived from the Archivo General de Indias Collection. This finding, in turn, facilitated the analysis of their representation in the archive through a combination of distant and close reading. The paper offers a case study about the Alazapas, a Coahuiltecan speaking nation that established alliances with the Spaniards for the evangelization and the governance of a village in Coahuila at the end of the XVII century. This case study contributes to the scholarship of Indigenous Borderlands by analysing the agencies, strategies, and alliances of Coahuiltecan-speakers nations during the Colonial period. Moreover, establishing a database that associates historical documents mentioning Indigenous nations with spatiotemporal data will facilitate more profound analyses of the territory as a cultural region that has shifted over time. The application of this methodology to other non-digitized corpora will contribute significantly to addressing the multiplicity of ethnic denominations that the literature has presented in the past as one of the leading research problems in the field of regional Indigenous ethnohistory.