The Jumanos were a tribe or several tribes, who inhabited a large area of western Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, especially near the Junta de los Rios region with its large settled Indigenous population. They lived in the Big Bend area in the mountain and basin region. Spanish explorers first recorded encounters with the Jumano in 1581. Later expeditions noted them in a broad area of the Southwest and the Southern Plains.

The last historical reference was in a 19th-century oral history, but their population had already declined by the early 18th century. Scholars have generally argued that the Jumanos disappeared as a distinct people by 1750 due to infectious disease, the slave trade, and warfare, with remnants absorbed by the Apache or Comanche. Frederick Webb Hodge proposed that they merged into the Wichita people, having morphed first to be known as the Tawehash, considered a division of the Wichita.

Variant spellings of the name attested in Spanish documents include Jumana, Xumana, Humana, Umana, Xoman, Sumana, Chome, Humano, Juman, Xumano, and Xume.

Spanish records from the 16th to the 18th centuries frequently refer to the Jumano Indians, and the French mentioned them as present in areas in eastern Texas, as well. During the last decades of the 17th century, they were noted as traders and political leaders in the Southwest. Contemporary scholars are uncertain whether the Jumano were a single people organized into discrete bands, or whether the Spanish used Jumano as a generic term to refer to several different groups, as the references spanned peoples across a large geographic area.

The Jumano have been identified in the historical record of present-day Texas. They combined and became a new people in a process of ethnogenesis, formed from refugees fleeing the effects of disease, Spanish missions, and Spanish slaving raids south of the Rio Grande.

Cabeza de Vaca may have encountered the Jumano in 1535 near La Junta, the junction of the Conchos River and Rio Grande at Presidio, Texas. He describes his visit to the "people of the cows" in one of the towns, but these may have been the settled Indians of La Junta. They were people "with the best bodies that we saw and the greatest liveliness." He described their cooking method, in which they dropped hot stones into prepared gourds to cook their food, rather than cooking in pottery. Their cooking technique was common among the nomads of the Great Plains, for whom pottery was too fragile to be transported. For this reason, scholars think he may have been describing the semi-nomadic Jumano.

The Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo first used the term Jumano in 1582, to refer to agricultural peoples living at La Junta. This area was a trade crossroads and seems to have attracted numerous Indians of different tribes, of which the Jumano were one group. Among the other names the Spanish used for Indian groups near La Junta were the Cabris, Julimes, Passaguates, Patarabueyes, Amotomancos, Otomacos, Cholomes, Abriaches, and Caguates. A member of Espejo's expedition identified some bison-hunters whom they encountered on the Pecos River near Pecos, Texas as being Jumano.

The hunters were known to have close relations with the Indians at La Junta, but whether they were full-time bison-hunting nomads, or lived part of each year in La Junta is uncertain. Charles Kelley has suggested that the sedentary people living at La Junta were Patarabueye and the bison hunters were Jumano. In this scenario, the nomadic Jumano maintained close relations—and possibly spoke a similar language—with the people living at La Junta, but were distinct from them. From their recognized homeland between the Pecos and Concho Rivers in Texas, the Jumano traveled widely to trade meat and skins to the Patarabueye and other Indians in exchange for agricultural products.