TLAXCALLAN - An Indigenous American Republic

Native American cultures need SOOOOOOOO much more media exposure. Thank you so much for being part of the solution. Cheers, friend!

Love stuff on Native American archeology, I’ve never heard of most of this

Just read about these guys in Dawn of Everything, absolutely bonkers how much diversity there was in Mesoamerican political systems.

Fantastic video! It was a pleasure working with you! A very underrated and underappreciated region and period of history no doubt!

As someone born in Tlaxcala this was very good, most Mexicans just think we are traitors, when in reality we where just defending ourselves from potentially being turned into pozole, very good video, loved it.

Stefan, this is great. Not that it "rewrites" history, but that it UN-DOES bad history. Very nice.

Really liked this video! I think fo us Mexicans it's a touchy subject, how the modern state of Tlaxcala set certain "stones" in the way for the Spanish conquest and all... Growing up in cdmx we know there are two sister republics; Yucatán and Tlaxcala. Yucatán because they had a very strong secession movement (and even were their own country for a ridiculous short time) and Tlaxcala because of what you exposed. They're the reminder of the broad palette of nations that are now under the Mexican state, but sometimes this also becomes negative. There's another popular saying, that Tlaxcala doesn't even exist. Back when the PRI created the Mestizo narrative of a homogeneous mixture of european and indigenous culture as the prevailing population in México, the glorious past of the mesoamerican civilizations was uniformed towards the Mexica and Tenochtitlan, thus making Tlaxcallan traitors and parias in the eyes of history, even though officially they've also been recognized as the cradle of mestizaje and even the model for Patria, the humanized icon of the motherland México comes famously from Tlaxco, Tlaxcala. The state has been really underdeveloped, it's lightly populated, lacks in infrastructure at the federal and private level (they celebrated a couple of years ago their first escalator in the whole state and the grand opening of their own Starbucks) and lack in opportunity and justice (the biggest network of child sex trafficking has taken over certain region) plagues their daily life, but we need to reappropriate and revalue the historical and cultural achievements of our natives from this modern state, sister republic of Tlaxcala. Thank you for this vid.

I’m from Tlaxcala but have been raised in California most of my life. I knew a little bit about Tlaxcala history, and today I learned much more. Thank you for that! Amazing history!!

Great video! Something I think that's important to note though is that most if not all Nahua altepeme/city-states existed along a spectrum of being monarchial, to aristocratic, to oligarchical/democratic: Tlaxcala merely existed on the extreme latter end of that spectrum. Even Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, had a council of 4 political officials which allegedly elected kings (just in practice always from the same royal family), and a council of nobles which also had at least nominal power (though the specifics of these varies between sources). Likewise, recorded customary speeches and certain discussions between officials recorded in the Florentine Codex or Duran's history have kings of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, it's sister city, consulting the common people and framing descions as things that they public needed to approve or deny. Now, surely some, likely most, of this is merely custom and nominal, and as you've explained the Tlaxcalteca take these to further extremes, but it still shows that more communal political systems was a shared cultural foundation across Nahua states. On the other hand, I'm also under the impression that Tlaxcala, in turn, DID technically have Tlatoani/kings (you mention Tlatoque in the video, but I am specifically thinking of Tlatloque for each of the 4 subcities, like Tiztlan, tho I also know some researchers have refuted Tlaxcala being a compound city at all and such accounts being erronous) but their role in the political system was minimized compared to Tlaxcala's version of the councils Tenochtitlan had, which as you note in Tlaxcala were open to commoners. I don't have a particular source for this off the top of my head (which is how I am typing this all up, apologies for that!), but I am pretty sure that I've read that, much like how colonial period sources exaggerated the differences between Tenochtitlan and Texcoco, the former as warlike (sort of a Sparta) and the latter as intellectual (sort of like Athens), such sources also exagerrated the differences between Tenochtitlan and Tlaxcala (not that such differences don't exist or aren't significant) I also think it would have been worth mentioning how Teotihuacan fits into this. You bring up the city and it's unusual layout, but any disscusion of represenative rule in Mesoamerica should talk about it's potential political system. For those who aren't aware, during the Mesoamerican Classic period, Teotihuacan was a major metropolis in Central Mexico (actually in a subvalley inside of the larger Valley of Mexico the Aztec political core would be located in a millennia later), It is unusual, for a number of reasons: One, it's gigantic. Housed 100,000+ denizens, and covered a total area (as of surveys from 50 years ago, so there may be more!) of 37 square kilometers. Of course, larger Maya cities had sprawls covering dozens or even hundreds of square kilometers, but in Teotihuacan, around 20 of those 37 square kilometers was the urban core itself. On that note, all the structures in that core were on a planned grid, organized not around a plaza, but a central road. As for what structures could fill this massive urban grid, it was almost all palaces: Almost every denizen in Teotihuacan lived in fancy palace/villa compounds with dozens of rooms, courtyards, painted frescos, some with toilets and running water, etc. We also know the city was multi-ethnic, with certain neighborhoods showing writing, burial patterns, art, etc from Zapotec, Maya, Gulf Coast, and West Mexican cultures. Finally (there's also no ball courts aside from a small one early in the city's history that was buried, but, while unusual, doesn't tie into my point here) there's been no royal tombs or signs clear signs of authoritarian leadership found so far inside the city. So quite a few researchers believe it had a represenative or democratic government as well; though there's also some evidence that it invaded and installed rulers on some Maya cities like Tikal and the inscriptions that suggest that do mention Fire-Is-Born and Spearthrower-Owl, who are often talked about as Teotihuacano generals or kings, but could of course be elected officials too, perhaps (and not everybody agrees they were actually Teotihuacano) If you (though you may already know most of it!) or anybody else is curious for more info, there's a video on the Ancient Americas channel I helped them with on Teotihuacan, there's also a pinned comment from me there with extra resources that didn't make it into the video... on THAT note, if you ever cover Mesoamerica again, feel free to reach out and I'd be glad to help if my schedule permits it, be it with research, resources, script proofreading, lending photos I have taken, etc. Rafael (who always does amazing art but really knocked it out of the park here!) or Aztlanhistorian can send you my info!

I always imagined the first republics on well protected rocky shores (or close to them) not in the middle of the land completely surrounded by a strong warrior empire. I wonder what conditions pushed the tlaxcalans to develop their fascinating political system

There was another republic too in the north east, the iroquois confederation. A lot of the archaeology research on it was done by French Canadians and is only available in french, but there’s quite a lot of material in English too. It’s an all around fascinating video, thank you Stefan for the quality of the content you produce. What a man.

When I woke up this morning, basically all I knew about Tlaxcala was that they were Cortez' most reliable allies against the Aztecs. To my eternal shame, I essentially thought of an entire culture as patsies for imperialism. They're now one of the aspects of Mesoamerican history I'm most interested to learn more about. Thank you for this video.

Great video! Slick editing and a topic I knew nothing about.

Fantastic and well done! Happy new year!

*Slowly steals Stefan‘s video-making process *

Just finished my first semester of college for anthropology, thanks for all the inspiration and keep up the good work!

Yes! I love me some not-all-civilisation-starts-in-Greece. This is great. I am now googling all the lesser known ancient republics, that's my christmas sorted...

Lose the N and double L. Tlaxcala. Tlaxcallan is a Spanish misspelling. Much of if not all of what the Spanish wrote/translated is incorrect and also based on the Spanish mind and religion. Tortillas were not invented until more recent times. Around 700 years ago. Tlaxcaneques would have been eating tamales which were more common. Tezcatlipoca is not a deity. It is a universal conscious/metaphysical concept to describe the forces (not single not one not a creator) of the universe which organizes material so that life can come into existence, amongst other meanings like ancestral memory as one example. There are 4 tezcatlipocas not one. One of them is Quetzalcoatl which represents all creation and it’s beauty. Quetzal means beauty or beautiful not bird or feather, those are two different and distinct words. Beautiful Serpent (Quetzalcoatl) is similar to string theory, everything that exists and we experience is made up of energy that undulates on the earth like a snake, and because that’s what produces all life it is a beautiful/“Quetzal” serpent/“Coatl” or creation, matter, energy, etc. The three tezcatlipocas are unknowable and only visible via a smokey mirror, akin to the subconscious, they organize and produce Quetzalcoatl ( a person who was named Quetzalcoatl is one who knows all these mysteries of the universe creation and life on earth including the elements, astronomy, engineering, math, cultivation, or what we we call a polymath today and so worthy of leadership). Without the 3, creation/life as we know it does not exist yet the universe , energy and forces within it (tezcatlipocas) exists no matter what. They’re universal/cosmological concepts that work together, like the forces of nature, not gods to be worshipped or sacrificed to. Fray Sahaguns manuscripts were rejected by the Vatican 3 times because they did not mention an all powerful omnipotent etc god. They ended up using teotl to represent an Abrahamic like god and that’s not what it represents. At all. The Catholic Church burned almost all codex and then redraws them and they are used by academics to make claims. There is no evidence of human sacrifice. It was all made up by the Catholic Church and the Spanish. The reverence of ancestors and keeping their remains, cleaning them and maintaining them, metaphysical concepts describing heavenly occurrences, and capital punishment of captured opponents were used to make claims of human sacrifice. The Greeks actually sacrificed children to gods and there is real evidence for that but that’s rarely spoken of. They actually did it. Texas must be sacrificing people if that’s what you consider human sacrifice. Because there were no gods there is no god to sacrifice to. The sun was not a god, it’s what produced tonal (energy, heat, warmth, light and so produced and maintained life, only on earth, because it’s not a god). The codex which survived deal with metaphysical concepts not reality. Using Catholic sources to explain indigenous information is like using Nazi propaganda to describe ww2 in history books. If you had real knowledge of ancient civilizations on these continents I would expect a response. Btw Ihuitl = feather Tototl = bird Wanna know more? Start w Arturo Meza. And forget what you learned from the Catholic myth peddlers and the academic institutions using them as sources. They’re willfully ignorant.

The Iroquois Confederacy has been classified as a "representative democracy", very close to being a republic.

Hey Stefan! Maybe another tip to pursue: Roderick McIntosh's research into early urbanism along the Niger river. I thought of it when you spoke of the archaeology of Tlaxcalla supporting the evidence of a Tlaxcallan republic.